Hasta La Gadget!

So much for the Kogan Agora handset. Kogan, the Melbourne-based electronics manufacturer, announced today that it has put its plans for an Android handset on hold indefinitely due to “potential future interoperability issues.”

Ruslan Kogan, who heads up the company, planned to release the phone on Dec. 15. The date was subsequently pushed back to Jan. 29 and the price was bumped up from $199 to $299.

“The Agora reached a very late stage of development, manufacturing had commenced and we were within days of shipping the product to customers. But it now seems certain the current Agora specifications will limit its compatibility or interoperability in the near future,” he told The Age.

The site speculates that Kogan’s decision was the result of a recent meeting, which the 25-year-old electronics manufacturer had with Google at their American headquarters, earlier this week.

While the T-Mobile G1–the first commercially-available Android handset–is only available in the US, Australian consumers can still purchase the unlocked Android Dev Phone 1 for a cool $399.

Our next president, Barack Obama, got elected in part because he transcends the way many Americans thought of race. Raised by his white mother and grandparents in Hawaii and Indonesia, he was also strongly affected by his father, a Kenyan immigrant, and he married into a Black American family. Black, white, Kansan, Kenyan, Hawaiian, he defines his own categories.

So it’s fitting that the “color” of the Obama Phone being sold in Kenya is “Black + Obama colour.” Apparently, Obama is now a color! I’m reminded of a great column I saw online a few months ago – I’m still trying to find the link – where a guy ordered a coffee “Obama,” and got it with just the perfect amount of milk and sweetener.

Anyway, back to the tech. The MI-205f Obama is a basic candybar-style phone with a color screen, flashlight and FM radio, being sold by Mi-Fone, a firm owned by Latin American mega-cell-phone-company America Movil who work with distributors in five African countries. They sell super-low-cost phones to hip African youth, driving mobile phones into new markets.

Mi-Fone jumped on the Obama idea just recently, founder Alpesh Patel said in an e-mail. Obama is tremendously popular in Africa as an inspirational figure, he said, and “is the best thing that has happened to Africa in many, many years.” The phone will serve as a memento of the inauguration for Kenyans, he said.

“Obama is from Africa and we are an African company … We decided to use what we do best, mobile devices, and coordinate the Obama look into one of our products. Furthermore our tagline is, ‘The World Is Yours,’ very inspirational, motivational and aspirational, similar traits to Obama’s tagline ‘Yes, We Can,'” he wrote.

The Obama Phone went on sale Jan. 15 and sold more than 1,000 units in its first day, Patel said. It costs around $30.

The Mi-205f “is a very affordable model and we wanted to ensure that most people can afford the phone,” Patel wrote in an e-mail.

Motorola plans to hand pink slips to 4,000 workers, 3,000 of which will come directly from the handset unit, according to Engadget, confirming an earlier story from Tuesday.

The report said that the news comes along with a preliminary fourth quarter earnings estimate of a 7 to 8 cent per share loss. The current word is that Motorola plans to focus on Google’s Android operating system as a platform for future smartphones, in lieu of Windows Mobile (which currently powers the Q9m, Q9c, and the Q9h).

Motorola hasn’t had a hit cell phone since the original RAZR in 2004; since then, the company has focused on churning out dozens of varieties of RAZRs and RAZR-like models, and produced a somewhat revamped successor. The Q line was modestly successful but not a home run for the company.

Technology has long found new and innovative ways to annoy us with advertising. Just when you though that businesses had exhausted the avenues by which to pitch their products, you get a text message. From AT&T. Telling you to watch the season premier of American Idol.

The wireless carrier did that yesterday, texting a “significant number” of its customers and telling them to watch the show. AT&T, a sponsor of the show, has the market cornered on Idol voted, meaning that every time the show is on, the country’s largest wireless carrier gets a huge chunk of dough.

Are advertisers stepping over the privacy line with cell phones? Two advocacy groups, the Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group, are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether mobile marketers are violating users’ privacy, according to our news report.

The two groups assert that emerging mobile marketing shops are beginning to employ the same “unfair and deceptive” behavioral targeting strategies as older Web marketers. “Mobile devices, which know our location and other intimate details of our lives, are being turned into portable behavioral tracking and targeting tools that consumers unwittingly take with them wherever they go,” the groups said in the official complaint.

The report said that the groups are asking the FTC to examine how mobile ad companies deploy techniques like behavioral targeting (serving ads to people based on their online activity) and geo-targeting (serving ads based on people’s physical location). The groups are asking for the FTC to require companies to notify users about how their data is used and to ask for consent. The complaint singles out three companies in particular—Bango, MarchEx, and AdMob—but mentions a list of others.