Does QVGA spell "faceplant" for Android phones?

Cell Phone Editor

| August 20, 2009

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Let me take you back to January 16th, 2009. People around the world were disappointed when it was announced that their pre-orders for the affordable, GSM-unlocked, Kogan Agora cell phone could not be honored. Just thirteen days before the ship date, buyers were promised a refund within the week.

What was to be the world's second Android phone was already obsolete. And the spec at the center of this debacle was the 2.5" QVGA resistive touch screen. Australian entrepeneur Ruslan Agora explained:

"One of the potential issues is the screen size and resolution. It seems
developers will be creating applications that are a higher resolution
than the Agora is currently capable of handling.

I am sorry for
this delay, but in the interest of doing things right by the Kogan
brand promise, and you, the customers, I cannot disappoint you by
supplying a product that I am aware will shortly have significant
limitations.

In order to fully appreciate the feature-rich
applications Android developers will be creating in coming months and
years, the Agora must be redesigned."

That was a long time ago in the cell phone world, and we haven't heard much on the cell phone front from Kogan since then, although they did launch a netbook sporting their Android phone's namesake.

Flash forward to August 19th, 2009, when AT&T's would-be number one Android handset, the Lancaster, is delayed at best; eliminated at worst. Indications are that work on a custom UI might have been at fault. I wote a post on the topic and casually mentioned that production may have been halted to pop a better display into the phone, but I didn't put much thought into it... until now.

Lancaster's preliminary specs put the display at 2.8" with 240 x 320 pixels - QVGA. I may be reading to much into this, but the two most prominently put-off Android handsets share the same screen resolution - and that very issue was cited as the cause of failure for one of them.

Now more bad news: what is possibly AT&T's next Android device in line to launch, the Motorola Heron (previously known as Iron Man), supposedly sports - you guessed it - a 2.8" QVGA display. This one is expected in November, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens there. Don't get your hopes up.

I'm not aware of any other QVGA displays in the official list of upcoming Android devices, and it looks like there's a very good reason for that. Right now, Android only supports HVGA. From what I've read, support for other resolutions is coming, but for QVGA? I kinda hope not.