Angus Kidman05 December 2008, 11:22 AM
On sale for less than a day, Kogan's Agora Android phone has already attracted orders from Australia and overseas, and a touch-screen only successor is on the cards.
Kogan Technologies' founder Ruslan Kogan has been waiting for more than a year to put a phone based on Google's Android operating system on the market. "I used to discuss how good an open source mobile phone would be with my friends," he told APC in an exclusive interview. "We're seeing open source being used everywhere. I used to say to people, 'it will be the best mobile phone when it happens'."
As APC reported earlier today, Agora phone — the first Android-based phone in Australia, and one of the first in the world to have no network contracts attached to it — will go on sale on January 29. (The name comes from the Greek word for an open marketplace, and reflects the community-based approach that's a core part of the open source ethos, Kogan explained.)
Above: 25 year-old Ruslan Kogan in front of some of his affordable TVs, sales of which funded the creation of the world's second Android smartphone.
The phone, which is being assembled in China, has been in active development since early September. Kogan Technologies specialises in selling bargain-priced electronics, having branched out from LCD televisions to other products like GPS receivers and cameras. A phone might seem like a more complicated proposition, but Kogan said many of the core development skills — pulling together components from suppliers in an affordable package — were the same.
"There certainly has been a lot of R&D going into this product launch," Kogan said. "The challenge with Android has been because Google only recently released the source code, not every manufacturer has drivers and software written to be compatible with Linux and Android. We've had to write a lot of our own drivers and software."
That's likely to change in 2009, Kogan predicted. "Give it a year, and every mobile phone component manufacturer will be crazy not to have an Android driver for their components. It'll be the fastest-growing segment of the market. There's more people writing software and improvements for this platform than any of the big companies have on their entire staff."
While waiting for more hardware driver to appear might have made for an easier development process, Kogan was keen to get a product on sale quickly. "Time to market is very important. The uptake of the Australian market is excellent in terms of the latest gadgets and the best technology."
While some of the Agora's specifications might seem basic compared to its competitors (especially the screen resolution, for example), keeping the price down was a key design consideration. "One of the goals is to make technology as affordable as we can."
Initial feedback when Kogan first announced via its site that it was moving into the phone market also led to the development of the basic $299 model, which doesn't include a camera, Wi-Fi or GPS features."Wi-Fi and GPS and camera are included in a lot of phones, but it's something most people never use. And we had so many people email us and say can you release a phone without a camera?," Kogan said, citing employers like the Defence Force who bar camera phones in the workplace. "There's a huge market out there for people who don't want the camera on the phone."
Kogan also didn't want to sell the phone in conjunction with any carriers. "We're not going to make people lock into certain contracts just because they want that piece of hardware."
Although the phone won't ship for nearly two months, orders have already been brisk. "The response has been great, we've had quite a lot of international interest," Kogan said. While overseas buyers will need a separate power adaptor to use the phone outside Australia, Kogan said the company might produce US or Europe-specific models if demand from a particular territory was strong.
Other future product plans may include a touch-screen only model (the current Agora sports a full keyboard as well as a basic touch-screen. "One of the areas we will look at down the track is making a full touch-screen phone," Kogan said, though that would require hardware improvements. "I don't think touch technology is quite there yet. It's great fun to play with photos, but if you want to write an email quickly or enter a URL it's not the best thing. If touch technology progresses and it can be more snappy and accurate, I'll look at a full touch screen."