Kogan Agora Pro

The Agora was to be the second phone based on Google’s Android OS. It was to be unveiled tomorrow. Sadly, it looks like that won’t be the case. Apparently the screen Kogan chose didn’t support a high enough resolution to support many new Android apps (I’m guessing Cupcake). Back to the drawing board.

Although the phone was to be made available to T-mobile customers in Australia, you could order one for full price on the Kogan site regardless of where you live. Because that’s fair dinkum.

After painstakingly photoshoping the previous image, I immediate fire up Chrome to post it to my blog:

And then:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

I downloaded Google’s new Chrome web browser, particularly sold on the whole multi-threaded thing. I like to have about a million tabs open and it really sucks when one crappy javascript page goes bonkers and kills all your other tabs. Also I have a dual CPU; it’s nice to finally see a browser take full advantage of that.

Having just started using the browser I can definitely notice the speed difference on complex web applications like Wordpress and Gmail. Chrome flies. Using a web application is snappy on Firefox 3 with Google Gears, but still noticeably faster under Chrome.

During my testing Firefox 3 locked up once, something which hasn’t happened yet with Chrome. If Google has simply created a crash free browser then that is quite an achievement.

Interface wise Google wins hands down. Clean and simple, whereas Firefox 3’s default XP theme sports a childlike feel that is a definite turn off to serious business users. The drag and drop tab management is smooth.

Things I miss:

• A master password for all saved passwords. Maybe it’s a false sense of security, but I don’t like the fact that anyone can open options and view my saved passwords. When Google displays a saved password, you can’t copy and paste it. I think that the password may be actually displayed as images instead of characters as a form of security.
• Spell Check. It’s there, but there is no way to add words to the dictionary.
• Plugins. I need my Web Developer and Chatzilla.

Good cues taken from other browsers:

• Integrated Stop/Refresh button. I lobbied hard to get this in Firefox 3. Well at least I lobbied a little bit. Wasn’t this originally a Netscape feature? What happen?
• Privacy Mode or “Incognito”. You know, for browsing pr0n. Even IE is doing it.
• Google/Wikipedia/Dictionary.com search bar. That multipurpose search bar in Firefox is hard to beat.

True innovations:

• Multi-threaded code. The task manager rules.
• Sweet tab interface. The dragging and dropping is fun.
• Performance. What a concept!?!?