

Agora phone exposes Android’s Achilles Heel - raganwald
http://counternotions.com/2009/01/19/agora/

======
Anon84
This sums it all up pretty nicely:

    
    
        Similarly, Win32 API was proprietary but resulted in
        the largest app platform ever. Apple’s FairPlay DRM is 
        proprietary but created the largest legal media 
        ecosystem to date. So while the power of proprietary 
        platforms to create large markets has been 
        demonstrated, the ability of open source to create 
        large and lucrative markets coherent enough to attract 
        commercial developers in the consumer markets is yet to 
        be proven.
    
        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.

~~~
halo

      the ability of open source to create large and lucrative markets coherent enough to attract 
      commercial developers in the consumer markets is yet to be proven.
    

What about the web?

~~~
jws
You mean the one that grew into a large commercial market dominated by the
proprietary Internet Explorer, Netscape Browser, and Netscape Server?

[Netscape server was never a huge percentage of the servers, but it was the
server of choice for companies during the period when the web turned from
computer oddity to "thing real people use". The netscape browser only became
open source in their death spirals.]

------
pxlpshr
_Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market
and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and
incompatible interests._

wow, couldn't agree with this more. this is exactly why I've been on the fence
about going after Android till it matures a little more.

Apple is closed-platform, and I understand that its often an issue in the
hacker community but I honestly see it as an enabler... particularly for
indies and small shops. Until the iPhone and OSX, gone were the days of the
small teams. To build for Windows configurations, you often had huge cost
sinks like support and QA... likewise for the gaming industry.

Now hackers have things Microsoft's XNA and the iPhone that are giving small,
visionary teams the ability to create AND MORE IMPORTANTLY produce to the
WORLD out of their garage (oh, and reap direct fiscal rewards).

~~~
halo
Once again, the web, a completely open standard and largely built on open-
source software. The web has done much more for "hackers", "indies" and "small
shops" than the iPhone, OS X and XNA have /combined/. Let's not forget that
the iPhone bases much of its popularity on the web either.

~~~
pxlpshr
I think your point can tip in either direction because I see the "open
success" of the consumer web relying a lot on 3 or 4 dominant browsers who are
tackling the hardware issue for you, thereby giving you a platform to develop
on. Not to dissimilar from the benefits of working with Adobe AIR /
Silverlight.

What the web doesn't offer is a direct publishing path to the consumer, where
commerce occurs with one-click, and installation is seamless. +1 for XNA and
iPhone.

------
cx01
German IT news site heise has some interesting information regarding this:
[http://www.heise.de/mobil/Fehlstart-Android-Handy-Kogan-
Agor...](http://www.heise.de/mobil/Fehlstart-Android-Handy-Kogan-Agora-kommt-
nicht--/newsticker/meldung/121890)

Allegedly an unknown HTC executive told an Australian magazine that Kogan
actually never had the money to build a smartphone. The compatibility problems
were only used as an excuse.

------
halo
Terrible companies can make terrible products irrespective of whether they're
running Android or not. The only difference being is that if it is running
Android, articles like this are written.

Edit:

    
    
      the iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular smartphones in the U.S.
    

I'm not sure why people keep repeating this dubious fact. Blackberry is the
most popular in the US, Nokia are worldwide.

~~~
gaius
Because there are lots of different kinds of Blackberries.

~~~
halo
Except the author of the article explicitly says they didn't mean that:

    
    
      The iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular
      smartphones in the U.S. with a single model.

~~~
Retric
iPhone is number one in sales even if not in market size.
[http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/22/picture-
iphones-r...](http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/22/picture-iphones-
rapid-growth-vs-blackberrys-slow-and-steady)

PS: OK, Q4 is probably a peek for the iPhone, so 2009 sales might not be a win
for the iPhone.

------
mattmaroon
"Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market
and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and
incompatible interests."

Sounds like what someone would have said about Windows in the early 80s, minus
the open source of course.

------
zmimon
I'm not sure you can generalise anything from the Agora ... it was always a
bit unbelievable that a minnow sized vendor could outdo every other cell phone
provider on the planet to become the second Android phone. My guess is that
these "interoperability" issues are more like "we tried 100 android apps and
only 1 of them worked on our phone because we really didn't test it at all and
now only just realized that we made a complete failure".

But I will say that as soon as I saw it I scanned the specs and figured I
would never buy it because of the low screen resolution. That was pretty bone
headed right from the start.

------
rbanffy
The summary: The Agora has hardware that's different from the G1. Developers
write software that, boneheadedly, rely on features of the G1 and won't run
correctly on the Agora. Suddenly, Open Source and Diversity are to blame.

Let the phones hit the market and let developers sort this one out. They
should be clever enough to deal with different screen form-factors,
resolutions, pointing devices and every other different gizmo one decides to
put in a phone.

More than any other Java platform, Android means "write once, test
everywhere".

~~~
there
> Let the phones hit the market and let developers sort this one out.

exactly. there has been 1 device on the market for developers to play with so
far, and the android emulator emulates the g1's form factor by default. put
another device out and developers will quickly adapt their code for it, but
until now there hasn't been any reason to.

come on kogan, we're all waiting on you.

------
andreyf
People run browsers in different resolutions, and developers learned to deal
with that...

Although I can see how it can appear this way to customers, this isn't really
Agora's problem, it's developers'.

