Kogan has taken to Android like a duck to water, consistently offering fairly nice low priced Android devices and their latest offering is the Kogan Agora Smart TV HDMI Dongle, it’s a pretty good concept that will allow you to play media, surf the web, check your email and utilise the Android app eco-system on your TV and Kogan are charging $99 at the moment which includes free shipping.
For a start the dongle runs Ice Cream Sandwich and has some pretty decent hardware specs as well including a 1GHz Cortex A9 Processor and Mali 400 GPU runs 512MB of RAM which allows it to support 1920×1080 resolution, it comes with 4GB of internal storage but has a MicroSD card slot capable of reading cards up to 32GB to expand this or you can plug a USB Drive up to 32GB into the full size USB 2.0 port on the rear, it includes Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and is powered by a mini USB plug.
The Dongle comes with a basic remote control but Kogan also have options on their site for 2 Keyboards, the Android Deluxe Wireless Keyboard & Trackpad for $39 or the Android Wireless Keyboard and Trackpad for $34.
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I actually have a keyboard very similar to the cheaper one, which I use when my phone is connected to the TV and it works pretty well, the higher end keyboard looks pretty interesting as well a personal choice there. The dongle comes with a 12 month Australian warranty where as cheaper options available online in other countries generally require return to base warranty.
It’s actually kind of nice running Android on a TV, I connect my phone up using an MHL adaptor and control it with a Bluetooth keyboard with trackpad, I can load a movie or play a game pretty easily, but if you don’t want to do that and want something basic for web surfing, youtube, email or media viewing and want it to remain connected at all times this could be for you, head over to Kogan and check it out.
