i-mate ceases trading, closes its doors forever

Sad news, now, as it’s being reported that i-mate, purveyor of some actually-really-rather-good Windows Mobile phones, has closed its doors, turned off the lights for the final time, shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to the join the choir invisible. It is an ex-manufacturer. And although I’m doing a joke there, because that’s human nature, and part of how we deal with grief, I am genuinely saddened by the loss of i-mate.

So, is it really all over?

Well, according to ITP, yes it is. The office in Dubai Internet City has been locked up, and employees, having been given a note saying they had to take two months unpaid leave, then received another note, basically saying that the leave was actually indefinite. CEO Jim Morrison is believed to have left the country.

There’s also the evidence of i-mate’s retail partners, who have been told, unofficially, that the company’s ceased trading. It’s a sad state of affairs, really. There’s all those people now out of work, the CEO’s run off to god knows where, and anybody who is waiting for delivery of an i-mate is bang out of luck.

Now, I appreciate that not many people will have even heard of i-mate. They were, to put it mildly, not one of the big boys, and they existed by getting handsets from OEM manufacturers, and rebadging them (as a side note, the first handsets they were selling were actually HTCs… yes, that’s right, current superphones like the HTC Touch Diamond2share genetics with i-mates). While the big boys were making a big fuss all round the world, i-mate quietly got on with the business of making phones, and because of that, I would imagine that virtually no modern phone consumers know who they are. Which is a shame, but hey, there you go.

And for me, it’s a doubly sad day, because I was planning on getting a new work phone at some point, and the one I had in mind was a bleedin’ i-mate Centurion.

That’s that idea stuffed, then
…