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Agora Android Phone Delayed By Glitches
An anonymous reader points out this report at News.com.au which says that "THE first Australian 'Google phone' set to go on sale within weeks has been delayed indefinitely, with the manufacturer Kogan forced to refund early buyers. In a statement released this afternoon, the company said the delay was 'due to future interoperability issues.'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."
From the annuncement:
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."
What?? I don't belive that someone a few days before release, find out that they need a higher resolution screen. I only thought the software business were that fucked.
What's the real story? Nobody goes into production without atleast you know having 1 prototype... They could have tried it first... It like a pretty serious obvious issue if it causes indefinite delays...
Please be responsible how you bury it. We have a global cooling crisis here in the US. The gallium arsenide in your cell phone adversely alters the magnetic convection current of the Earth once exposed to air. Please, be responsible.
--Sal Bore
Why don't you believe it? I see 2 different ways this could happen:
1) Someone finds a few apps that don't work at low res at all... Good apps like Google Earth or something.
2) The programmers assure him that it can be handled right up until the end, when they are forced to admit they can't do it after all because they finally found the fatal flaw in the plan.
As a programmer, I've had both things happen to me during a project. The first is just oversight and the second is usually due to some asinine quirk in the API that can't be worked around.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
phatsphere's correct. All the pre-orders are being refunded within the next 7 days, so none of us are out anything.
I will admit that I was taking a big chance on a company I'd never heard of with a product that was a lot cheaper than I thought it should be. I doubt the next version of the phone will be so cheap, now.
I really wish they'd just sold me the phone... Or given me the option.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
A couple of guys came from Google. Our CEO had been waiting for them by the door. someone says they went straight to a meeting room and were there for less than 20 minutes. no one saw them leave, but as soon as they were gone our CEO called a meeting. He looked very pale. he said: "I've halted the production on the Android phones." he said we were not to ship any of the products that have already rolled off. he told us to cancel all orders and refund all pre-orders. then he left the building with the marketing director.
Our CEO has not been back since then. This must be big.
I don't think 400 dollar is that cheap, with shipping and Swedish VAT it will become a quite normal price for a decent phone over here, not at all unreasonable.
Cheaper than a phone and 24 months subscription cost for a huge volume subscription? Yes, but not very cheap for the hardware in question.
I think you just said, "Of course this can happen -- because even though its a device manufacturer, they still have to deal with the fucked up world of software." Nice rejoinder.
Release it and then just patch it repeatedly for months on end, fixing some things and breaking others in the process. Eventually, say the phone is past the end-of-life and instead of fixing anything, suggest that your customers buy your newest phone.
This seems to work for most other businesses.
The programmers assure him that it can be handled right up until the end, when they are forced to admit they can't do it after all because they finally found the fatal flaw in the plan.
Or, alternatively, 3 days before shipping, the Pointy Haired Boss is finally forced to accept that the "political and economic realities" he's been trying to explain to the programmers for the last 3 months really are less important than those silly, geeky "laws of physics" which the programmers keep babbling about, and that all the unpaid overtime in the world won't produce a software patch that puts more pixels on the LCD.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It was $399/$299 (for the high-end/low-end models respectively) in Australian. That meant it was ~$250/$190 in U.S. dollars.
And doesn't want to go outside where it can meet up with nice hot little software numbers. Just maybe.
today is spelling optional day.
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He brings back the old x86 days when off-brand companies like his tout 'cold fusion' and deliver vaporware.
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Really a total disservice to the F/OSS community. I was worried about Koolu, but because they published their modifed stack and distro it showed commitment and was acceptable for them to be late to delivery (and they still are late though after promising a Dec release date). Kogan has done no such thing, just demo-ing a phone mockup at trade shows...
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Kogan, having a closed demo strategy (no beta testers?), holding to all the press releases, tech details and tooling around with a single phone that for all I know was showing a flash app is asking for some major b*tchslapping from the community. And now abrupt about the details of shutting down production & refunds, providing zero details is an insult to the Android community. If Google was involved and led to a legal issue, okay, mentioned it at least, but if it was technical, the community deserves to know the details.
This is not good for the Android community and [we] sure better find out why production was stopped. Was this:
Regardless of whose fault it is, they did one thing right that no American company or Sony would ever do. That is, after they realized their product wasn't ready, they actually went back to the drawing board instead of shipping the thing anyway.