That Agora phone from Australia that everyone got so moist about may never see the light of day, unfortunately. The phone’s manufacturer, Kogan, said that it’d be delayed indefinitely "due to future interoperability issues," according to News.com.au.
"The Agora reached a very late stage of development, manufacturing had commenced and we were within days of shipping the product to customers," company founder Ruslan Kogan said in a statement.
"But it now seems certain the current Agora specifications will limit its compatibility or interoperability in the near future."
Mr Kogan said one of the potential problems was applications with a higher resolution and screen size than what the Agora could handle.
"I now believe that in order to access all the Android platform has to offer, the Agora must be redesigned."
Something tells me there’s more to this story than screen resolution, but the fact remains that Kogan’s going to miss the January 29th ship date by a long shot while the company redesigns the handset. Those who had pre-ordered the phone have apparently been refunded and there’s some speculation that rumors about the G1’s release in Australia may have had something to do with the decision to pull the Agora, although it’s odd that a little bit of competition would be enough to scrap an entire project.
[via Slashdot]
The iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular smartphones in the U.S. with a single model. Except for a very small list of obvious hardware differences between the iPhone and iPod touch, Apple’s mobile platform by now offers a uniform market of 20+ million users, all carrying an identically configured device. Same industrial design, same OS, same multi-touch UI, same iTunes multimedia content, same DRM, same peripherals, same purchasing process, and same coherency that has already resulted in 10,000+ apps and half a billion downloads at the App Store.
iPhone developers do not have to worry about differing UIs or device configurations. They don’t have to accommodate all kinds of input devices from trackballs to multi-touch to stylus. They don’t have to invent their own syncing or notification systems. They don’t have to negotiate for different app stores. And as Kogan found out too late, they don’t have to worry about “compatibility and interoperability in the near future” in the form of varying screen sizes and resolutions.
Ironically, if the iPhone platform can fail to dominate the smartphone market because it’s too closed, the Android platform may fail because it’s too open, as I explain here:
“Agora phone exposes Android’s Achilles Heel”
http://counternotions.com/2009/01/19/agora/