Tech

Review: A $229 unlocked phone that marries the Galaxy S5 to the Moto G

Kogan’s Agora 4G is a solid midrange phone with a couple of quirks.

Andrew Cunningham – Aug 30, 2014 1:45 pm | 61

Kogan's Agora 4G (right) is like a larger version of the Moto G (left). Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Specs at a glance: BenQ/Kogan Agora 4G
Screen	1280×720 5.0-inch IPS (294 PPI)
OS	Android 4.4.2
CPU	1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 (quad-core Cortex A7)
RAM	1GB
GPU	Qualcomm Adreno 305
Storage	8GB NAND flash expandable via microSD
Networking	802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, 2G 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900MHz, 3G 850 / 900 / 2100MHz, 4G 900 / 1800 / 700MHz
Ports	Micro-USB, headphones
Camera	8MP rear camera, 2MP front camera
Size	5.63″ × 2.87″ × 0.35″ (143 x 73 x 9.0 mm)
Weight	4.76 oz. (135 g)
Battery	2520mAh
Starting price	$229 off-contract

You don’t have to pay $600 for an unlocked smartphone anymore. That much was true before the $179 Moto G won our hearts late last year, but that phone was one of the first examples of a new class of smartphone, the kind of device that could give you a budget phone that didn’t feel like a budget phone.

The problem is that there still isn’t a whole lot of choice in this segment yet. Heavy hitters like Samsung, HTC, and LG continue to price their flagship devices as they always have, and going for cut-down “mini” versions of the same phones generally only saves you $100 or $150. So if you like larger phones—say, five inches and up—but you didn’t have a lot of money to spend, your hands were tied by the options available.

That’s one of the reasons why we were intrigued by the Kogan Agora 4G when it was announced earlier this month. It’s got a bit of an odd pedigree—it was actually built with BenQ, but it’s branded and sold by Australian retailer Kogan—but it’s an unlocked phone available in the US that sells for $229. That’s more expensive than the $179 Moto G base model, but within spitting distance of the $219 Moto G LTE. It also comes with a five-inch screen, though, and this makes it look and feel more like a Samsung-esque flagship than a nice-but-cheap midrange phone.

The stream of inexpensive Android phones is only going to keep flowing—here’s what we think of the latest entry.

Look and feel

This is the third Agora phone and the first one we’ve reviewed, but based on our research it’s a decent leap forward from the second-generation hardware (which was itself a substantial improvement on the first one). The first was a chunky thing with a 5-inch, 800×480 display that ran Ice Cream Sandwich, and the second upgraded to a 720p display and Android 4.2. Both prioritized value over power, at $149 and $189 respectively.

The Agora 4G bumps the price up again, but you finally get a phone that’s less-obviously a budget model. The 5-inch 720p display stays the same, but it’s got a sleeker profile and better styling and some respectable internal upgrades—we’ll discuss those in more detail later, but suffice it to say this is essentially a Moto G in a larger shell.

The phone is all-plastic on the back and the sides and it doesn’t feel quite as sturdy as the Moto G, but it’s still nice for the price—Samsung’s plastic phones have a similar heft in the hand but cost three times as much. The Agora uses grey matte plastic around the edges and a black rubberized removable back cover that feels really nice to hold. We’re also fans of the subtle red accents on the front and rear speakers and the rear camera.

Past Kogan Agora phones, including the $189 model launched late last year, look less refined, and to add insult to injury they saddled Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich with Gingerbread-era capacitive buttons. The Agora 4G uses modern Android buttons in the standard alignment—back, home, and recent apps, from left to right in that order—and making those buttons capacitive rather than rendering them onscreen saves you a strip of screen real estate compared to the Moto G.

The onscreen buttons. They’re a bit dim—this is what they look like when they’re turned on. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

If we’ve got one complaint about them, it’s that they’re difficult to see when they aren’t lit up. Like the capacitive buttons on Galaxy phones, they light up briefly when you’re interacting with them and dim when you aren’t, and they’re small enough that they’re easy to miss in the dark.

Peel off the back of the phone to expose its micro SD card slot, compatible with cards up to 64GB in size, and its micro SIM slot. Like the Moto G, its battery is sealed away under a second cover, which means you won’t be able to replace it yourself.

Past Agora phones have reportedly had some trouble with audio quality through the headphone jack while using a set with an integrated microphone, but that appears to have been fixed in this phone—music and podcasts sounded just as clear from the Agora as they do through any other Android phone. The audio quality through the phone’s integrated earpiece is a little tinny but not unusable for calls, and we found the GPS to be wanting—it could usually find approximately where I was, but would do a bad job of tracking my exact location while walking, and you can forget using it to figure which direction you’re facing. On something with larger, easier to detect movements (a car, say), its lack of precision is less pronounced.

At five inches, the phone’s screen size is what really separates it from the Moto G. The two share the same 1280×720 resolution, but the Agora’s screen is a full half-inch larger. It makes things a little easier to read, despite the fact that the screen is less dense—at around 294 PPI, it falls short of the 326 PPI bar set by the various iPhone 4 and 5 designs. It’s also much lower than the 400-and-up PPI numbers you’ll get from a Galaxy S5 or an HTC One. It’s still more than crisp enough to render detailed text and images, though. I use a lot of phones, and I generally find that I can notice the difference when jumping from a 720p display to a 1080p display, but I don’t really miss the density when moving from a 1080p display back to a 720p panel.

We only had a couple of gripes with the hardware, aside from the capacitive buttons. One was that call quality was a little fuzzy and canned-sounding through the earpiece, though it’s not bad if you use headphones with an integrated microphone to do your talking. The other was that the power button is positioned on the top of the phone, which is fine in something smaller but annoying in a phone this tall. One-handed phone usage is pretty common if you’re walking down a street or standing on a train, and putting the button on the top of the device makes it difficult to press quickly without stretching. Yes, it’s a small problem, but it’s also a problem that the side-mounted power button fixed years ago.

Software: Cyanogen-flavored Android

The default Home screen. This is just Cyanogenmod with the open-source apps removed and replaced with Google apps. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Like so many other things about the phone, the software is a pleasant surprise. So many budget tablets and phones in this price bracket come loaded down with strange apps and heavy skins, but this one is running a version of Android that stacks just a few enhancements atop an unaltered Google-style foundation (install the Google Now Launcher, and it’s largely indistinguishable from a Nexus or Motorola phone).

In fact, this thing seems to be running some kind of build of Cyanogenmod, though neither the support page nor the physical packaging market it as such. The first telltale sign is the launcher, which like Cyanogenmod’s “Trebuchet” launcher strongly resembles the Google Now launcher without the Google Now part. The second is the “About phone” screen in the Settings, which shows an operating system kernel labeled “cmbuild,” same as any other Cyanogen-modded phone. Phones like the OnePlus One actually market the fact that they run Cyanogenmod, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s running on the Agora unless you knew what to look for.

The lengthy (and blessedly customizable) Quick Settings menu adds a whole bunch of stuff to the standard options. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Most of the Google- and Cyanogenmod-provided open source applications have been removed from the Agora in favor of the standard Google Apps loadout. The only pre-loaded apps that aren’t from Google are minor and mostly ignorable additions like an FM Radio app and a voice recorder.

The biggest deviations from standard Android are found in the Quick Settings panel, which is packed with extra icons. Some of it is unqiue to the Agora (a flashlight, a button that gives the screen a warm yellow tint), but most of them are just button-ized versions of other Android settings. By default the panel is way too busy—if I have to swipe to scroll through my quick settings, are they really “quick” anymore? But tap the pencil icon and start unchecking stuff and you can get it down to a more manageable number.

Kogan and BenQ have added a couple of other small flourishes that can be found in the main Settings app, including a swiped-from-LG feature where you can double tap the screen to wake it up (which I disabled because the phone was always waking up in my pocket) and a “flip to silence” gesture that will dismiss incoming calls if you flip the phone over. The one thing the phone doesn’t do is augment Android’s handling of SD cards, which as of KitKat has been limited in the name of security. Even the Moto E’s basic bulk file transfers would have been a nice addition, but for now you’re left to do your file management manually.

Camera

The Agora 4G’s camera manages to outdo the Moto G in the spec department—it’s got an 8MP rear camera and a 2MP front camera rather than a 5MP rear camera and 1.3MP front camera. It’s a small, slightly recessed lens at the top of the phone, right above its basic LED flash. We took a sample shot with decent indoor lighting, low indoor lighting, and outdoor lighting to get a sense of how it performs.

In general, the Agora’s camera surpasses the Moto G and Lumia 520 camera and is on about the same level as the iPhone 4S’ camera. Where the Moto G’s shots tend to be soft and a little smeary, the Agora opts for sharper pictures that get a little noisy and grainy in low light. If you’re taking pictures outside or in decent indoor lighting, you should get shots that are more than usable for Facebook, Instagram, or for smaller prints.

Internals and performance

This is where the Agora 4G is the exact double of the Moto G (and, for that matter, quite a few midrange phones; the 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 has turned out to be fairly popular among OEMs making both Android and Windows phones). It’s got 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, single-band 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0, and the standard complement of sensors. Our benchmarks show that the Moto G and Agora 4G are essentially indistinguishable in performance.

As we said in our Moto G review, it’s roughly equivalent in performance to a phone from early 2012. It’s fast enough for just about anything you’d need to do with it, and should remain that way for the foreseeable future.

The phone turns in similarly respectable battery life numbers. It didn’t last as long as the Moto G in our light Web browsing tests, but it can hang with the current crop of midrange-to-high-end handsets.

Striking fear into the hearts of OEMs

The Agora 4G is a pretty solid phone for the price, and it’s even more impressive when you consider that it was built by one company (BenQ), branded by another (Kogan), and runs software developed by two more (CyanogenMod and technically also Google). The biggest single criticism we can make is that Kogan is a small name, and it’s likely to come with small-name hardware support and small-name updates. We wouldn’t be surprised if it was never updated beyond Android 4.4.2, since we can’t find evidence that Kogan has issued Android updates for any of its previous phones.

That problem aside, this phone is the kind of thing that keeps every major Android vendor—Samsung, HTC, LG—up at night. It’s much cheaper than their high-end offerings, and much better than all their low-end offerings. It does basically everything that anyone would expect their smartphone to do, and it does it reasonably quickly and reasonably well. For all the “value” Android OEMs seek to add to their phones using pre-loaded apps and skins (and, in Android’s early days, OEMs did have to do more work to close gaps in Google’s stock OS and apps), these days they really don’t add much at all, at least not anything that people need to get by.

The Kogan Agora 4G. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

With respect to build quality and specs, the Agora 4G is more or less equivalent to a shrunk-down flagship like the HTC One Remix or the Galaxy S5 Mini—they both have a couple of extra features to recommend them, but the screens, the SoCs, and other key specs are broadly comparable. The difference is, those shrunk-down flagships sell for around twice the price of the Agora when there’s no carrier subsidy to act as a price cushion.

If you want a competent Android phone and don’t want to pay $500 or $600 or more for the privilege, an small but growing group of phones in the $150 to $250 range are coming out of the woodwork to suit your needs. Given that even the US carriers are slowly moving away from subsidies (and that many markets worldwide never relied on them in the first place), that’s got to be scary for any company making most of its money from more expensive phones.

The good

All-plastic construction, but it feels solid instead of cheap and slippery.
Nice 720p screen.
A good fit for people who like the Moto G, but find it to be too small.
Decent performance and battery life.
Respectable camera for the price.
Mostly-stock Android 4.4.2 with just a few toggle-able additions.

The bad

Has a removable back, but no removable battery.
Not much internal storage, and no software additions to make SD card management easier.
GPS is fine at finding your general location, poor at pinpointing your exact location.

The ugly

Kogan has made no Motorola-esque promises about future software updates, and we can find no evidence that its past phones have received updates after release.
Stop putting power buttons on the top of tall phones!

Listing image: Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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