The next Android mobile phone title race

Several months after the official launch of the T-Mobile G1, I have yet to see the second commercially available Android-based mobile phone. The title of “Second Android-based mobile phone” is still up for grabs since someone has yet to deliver on their promises and someone has yet to blog about their just delivered Android mobile phone.

As far as I am concerned, all of these articles going around the Net is simply just vaporware and marketing hype. Poised to come out with an Android-based mobile phones next year are companies like Motorola, Asus, Toshiba, Vodafone and Sony Ericsson.

It will really be great to see if the much talked about Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 will run the Android open mobile platform. This will should bring about a great head to head competition between Nokia’s N97, Apple’s iPhone 3G, Samsung’s Omnia and of course the T-mobile G1.

Almost a month back, John Biggs of CrunchGear, posted something about the China made zzzPhone. He has ordered one for himself but has yet to receive his mobile phone unit of the Android-based zzzPhone. The zzzPhone web site’s images of the zzzPhone looks like they were just Photoshopped images.

Qigi, another Chinese mobile phone manufacturer, has also announced the availability of it Android-based mobile phone. The Android based cell phone is intended for the Chinese market. The Qigi has features like integrated GPS, Marvell Monohans 624MHz processor, 2.8-inch 65k color LCD touchscreen, 2 Megapixel camera, WiFi, Bluetooth and microSD card slot. No 3G support on this one.

Openmoko, a Germany-based mobile phone vendor which also uses a linux-based open mobile platform, also looks like is going to have Android on it’s Neo Freerunner mobile phone. Koolu, a global distributor of the Openmoko, has announced that it will port the Android open mobile platform to the Neo Freerunner mobile phone which sports a nice 640×480 screen but no 3G capabilities.

Today, I pounced upon this Australian site that has announced the Jan 29th availability of it’s Google Android-based mobile phone dubbed as the Kogan Agora Pro. Pre-order price is at 399 dollars (US Australian dollars). The Android based mobile phone features Android™, a 2.5-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with 262K QVGA (320 X 240 pixel) resolution, 5-Way Central Navigation Key, QWERTY keyboard, Keyboard backlighting, GPS navigation capability, Bluetooth® 2.0 with EDR, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, 2.0 megapixel colour camera, audio, built-in microphone and speaker, headphone output, several supported ring tone formats (MIDI, MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV, PCM), several video formats supported (MPEG2 H263, H264, MPEG4, AVI), mail attachment support, support for a variety of multimedia formats JPEG, GIF, WBMP, MIDI, AMR, MP3, WAV), a talk time of 400 minutes (more than 6 hours), 624Mhz processor, microSD™ card expansion slot of up to 16 GB, quadband GPRS and UMTS/HSDPA 850/1900/2100 Mhz for operation almost anywhere in the world.

The Kogan Agora Pro also includes features like handsfree operation, FM radio, JAVA 2.0, SMS, Email, MMS 1.0, WAP 2.0, WAP Push, Web Browser, Video Recording (something the T-Mobile G1 and Apple iPhone doesn’t have), Media Player, Instant Messaging, Phone Book, Ring Silencer/Quick Silent, Scheduler/Organiser, Mini-USB Connectivity (charging, headset), Phone Book, Integrated Antenna, Fast Text Editor, Lunar calendar, Calculator and Alarm Clock.

The Kogan Agora Pro reminds me of the Nokia E71, Blackberry and Palm mobile phones. I wonder how it would do in terms of sale in the Australian market. Hmmm, wonder if I can sell this one at Ortigas Online to the Philippine market.

There is also a Kogan Agora model as you may have suspected. The plain Kogan Agora model sells for 299 dollars and it seems that the only difference from the Pro version is that this model doesn’t have a GPS unit installed (update: and no camera).

I’m sure there’s a lot out there, I’m just as eager to see what the delivered specifications of the next Google Android based mobile phone will be. For one thing, I see that video recording support seems to be with the Kogan Agora available and a standard headphone jack for music enthusiasts who just can live without their truly audiophonic headsets shouldn’t be a technological obstacle.