Like the green light on the end of Jay Gatsby’s pier, Ruslan Kogan’s vision of a Kogan-branded Android phone appears to keep receding into the future.
Like the green light on the end of Jay Gatsby’s pier, Ruslan Kogan’s vision of a Kogan-branded Android phone appears to keep receding into the future.
The entrepreneurial Melbourne importer and online reseller first announced the phone, dubbed the Agora, in October last year; made by a Chinese factory to his specs, it would be on sale at $199 by Christmas he promised.
That was later amended to January 29 and $299, but by mid-January Kogan was forced to cancel the launch, due to “potential future interoperability issues”.
In February, at Media Connect’s KickStart forum on the Gold Coast, Kogan said a redesigned Agora would hit the market “within three months” May at the latest.
This week he bobbed up in Sydney to promote new products, but the Agora wasn’t among them. He promised a release by year’s end, if he could get around industry “red tape”.
“A major company that doesn’t want us to release [the Android phone] is creating red tape… others expect that this will clear and [we] are looking to release by the end of this year ,” Kogan told Computerworld.
Kogan did have some very real new products to show off, including a $199 digital and Internet radio pictured with charging slot for an iPhone or iPod; a $169 digital photo frame that links by WiFi to FaceBook, Twitter and other social networking sites; a $249 GPS navigation system with 4.3-inch screen; and a $269 full HD 1080p Blu ray player all sold exclusively through his online store.
Kogan also revealed plans to move “aggressively” into the US market with a similar Net-based operation.
