DISQUS

VentureBeat: Kogan delays Android phone Arora to better serve developers

  • hypermark · 11 months ago
    Welcome to the pitfall of "open." The good news of totally open platforms is that you can pretty much do anything with it. The bad news of totally open platforms is that when you are trying to deliver a superior user experience, you either have to take on the burden of supporting "anything" or you have to set limits on what will work on your particular instantiation of the open platform, which of course, makes it less open, reducing leverage across the entirety of the ecosystem.

    That's not to say that these aren't solvable problems, but is suggestive that the inevitability of Android is far from a straight line.

    Cheers,

    Mark
  • TedHoward · 11 months ago
    Wait until someone introduces a massively-widescreen or massively-tall portrait device and they notice that the 1,000's of Android apps in existence look awful on it because they don't intelligently and dynamic rearrange their UI to take advantage of the screen size. How about all those apps working on the mythical Android-based netbook?
  • Craig Baker · 11 months ago
    Seems to me that Google put significant pressure on Kogan not to release this phone. Google have a huge interest in the success of Android. If this phone turned out to be of low quality it would have done significant damage to the Android brand.

    The small screen size story is rubbish. Android has been designed from day one to work on a variety of resolution. Android lets applications support various resolution using different layout files for each resolution. Application developers are well equipped to deal with varying resolutions.

    Kudos to Kogan for giving it a shot, but it was always going to be a mammoth task for a little guy to deliver.
  • Eric Eldon · 11 months ago
    Craig, it seems to me that you and Kogan are saying the same thing -- the phone sucked too much to release, so back to the drawing board. Specifically, it sucked so much that the company was worried that developers wouldn't even be interested. Not clear to me if Google even had a hand in it, although of course possible that they would.