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Take a trip with Agora the explorer. The Kogan Agora is a new Android phone that costs just £119, with two SIM card slots to save you money when travelling.
The Agora has a large 5-inch touchscreen, continuing the trend for large screens. The resolution is a blocky 480×800 pixels though, giving it 186 pixels per inch of detail — by way of comparison, the similarly priced Orange San Francisco 2 offers 267ppi.
Underneath the screen is a 1GHz Cortex-A9 dual-core processor with a stingy 512MB of RAM. It’s running the ageing Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich with access to apps from Google Play. The phone sports a 5-megapixel camera and a second camera for video chats, with 4GB of memory and a microSD card slot for storage.
The dual-SIM slot makes the Agora handy if you have wandering feet: travellers can keep their home SIM card in the phone so friends and family can get hold of you, but you can pop in a cheap local SIM too so you’re not paying exorbitant international rates when you just want to call a cab, or go online to check your email or look at Google Maps. And while you’re at home, you can have work and personal SIMs in the phone at the same time to save carrying round two phones.
It’s about time the Agora arrived: Australian company Kogan, which also makes affordable TVs, has been talking about the Agora for four years.
You can only buy the Agora directly from Kogan. That’s a risky strategy — it didn’t work even for Google, which tried and failed to get the original Nexus One off the ground selling directly, and has had terrible supply problems with its high-end Nexus 4. But we salute Kogan’s different approach and wallet-friendly pricing.
Of course, whether the phone measures up to budget heroes like the Huawei G300 remains to be seen, so look out for our review still to come to see if it’s worth parting with your hundred quid.
What do you think of the Kogan Agora? Are cheap Android phones a bargain or a false economy? Tell me your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page, and keep it CNET for the coolest gadgets and most powerful kit unleashed at CES.
