Hasta La Gadget!

Kogan’s Agora brand may not drive techies wild like Galaxies or iThings do, but its motto is clear: try to deliver reasonable hardware at the lowest possible price. The company’s first bid for a piece of the smartphone pie launched earlier this year, and today we’re learning of its sequel. Design-wise, this second Agora handset is a little curvier than the last, with a soft key replacing its predecessor’s physical home button. A 5-inch, 720p IPS LCD display occupies the face, and inside we’re looking at a 1.2GHz quad-core MT6589 Mediatek SoC (Cortex-A7), 1GB of RAM and 4 gigs of internal storage, expandable with up to 32GB cards of the microSD variety. It runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, hosts two SIM slots, an 8-megapixel main camera, 2-megapixel front-facer, 2,000mAh removable battery and 3G (850 / 1900 / 2100), WiFi (802.11b/g/n) and Bluetooth 4.0 antennae.

Most importantly, it costs $189, £149 or 199 Aussie dollars — it’s up for order now at the relevant source links and is expected to ship to the US, Australia, the UK and other European countries, as well as a couple of Asian markets starting October 3rd. We’re hoping to get a review unit through soon, so keep an eye out over the coming weeks for our impressions. In our opinion, anything that rings up at under $200 is worth a fair trial.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: Kogan (UK), (Aus), (US & elsewhere)

What kind of sorcery is this? A smartphone in the US that comes unlocked, retailing for just $149 without it hailing from two years back? Well, you would have to take your hats off to Australian electronics retailer Kogan for making this happen, as they intend to make a splash in the US market this February with a 5” Kogan Agora that will retail for $149 – contract-free, too. Basically, this Android-powered smartphone is meant to be accompanied by a pay-as-you-go plan from AT&T, T-Mobile, or an MVNO which works on those networks (Straight Talk would be a decent example).

Those who are interested would be able to place a pre-order from Kogan, and for $149, just what kind of specifications can you expect? Forget about all those fancy Full HD displays, this one is just basically functional with a dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB of internal memory that thankfully can be expanded further via a microSD memory card. At least it has Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as the operating system of choice, accompanied by a 5-megapixel rear shooter and a front facing VGA camera. There’s no LTE support though, but you get a 800 x 480 pixel display.

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