We've caught wind from a number of employees -- or ex-employees, as the case may be -- that
i-mate's US division in Redmond, Washington has all but disintegrated after a Friday bloodbath that saw the entire engineering, QA, and tech writing departments laid off, among others. Several honchos who weren't cut left anyway, perhaps unwilling to work in a ghost town or as a show of solidarity to their fallen brethren; notably, the Chief Software Officer and VP of Sales and Marketing are both gone, leaving a sales director to be promoted to the lofty title of GM of what seems to be all US operations. Apparently, the Dubai-based firm is in the hurt locker after its inability to get the
Ultimate line (also known as "the basket with all of i-mate's eggs in it") fully deployed to retail channels in the time frame it had hoped, and meeting massive resistance from US carriers to carry the devices, it's been left with no option but to leave behind just enough employees to set up and maintain a web-based portal for purchasing unlocked devices in the States. To those who've been handed your walking papers, we wish you the best of luck.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
posted Mar 1st 2008 2:23PM
Imate, just couldnt keep up with the mobile world. Nokia and the other companies moving a light speeds comparing to imate. Plus there fones are crappy. HTC beats them in every aspect.
i-Who?
I didn't even know they had a U.S. presence. Where has anyone seen any on sale here?
Come on.
haven't tried these models,
but the 2 imate phones I've had were awesome. I really liked the small wi-fi imate SP5 which runs windows mobile 5. Be a shame for a Windows Mobile player to go down in flames. I like the option of having that OS on my phone as opposed to the future with only iphones and the google os... why onearth would I want a Nokia proprietary os when I can get decent non-java 3rd party apps for windows mobile, iphone (if you want to deal with the hassle of unlocking) or the gphone oses when they arrive??
Symbian may be proprietary, but it is definitely not a Nokia-only OS. Ericsson (& Sony-Ericsson), Samsung & Panasonic all have stakes in it too.
In a way, this makes it far less proprietary than say, an operating system owned by a single company. (*cough*Windows Mobile*cough*)
Every last phone in that pic is far more powerful than any US offering.
So yeah, we "did" miss out on some real-power, esp the swivel 7150 up there.
To think the Tilt/Mogul/iPhone are low end offerings to the rest of the world.
Damn - I was waiting for the 9502... guess I will be waiting a long time
I have been selling the 6150 and 8150 for the last few weeks and have had no complaints. My contact at i-Mate tells me that the 8502 and 9502 are due out here by the end of the month. I am still waiting for the Jama 101 & 201 as they really cheap WM6 handsets.
Big changes... i-Mate with poor marketing and delivery, and E-Ten swallowed up by Acer.
HTC is being handed the winning trophy - if they weren't such assos and cared so little about their customers.