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New strategy of i-mate September 06, 2006 [General] | By Edward J. R. Now that HTC has purchased Qtek and is promoting its own brand strongly - apart from manufacturing for wireless carriers under their brands, i-mate clearly needs to change to survive! After all the "additional support" touted so much by i-mate in reality is not as good as it is supposed to be, as many i-mate customers revealed to us. Therefore clearly i-mate needs something more than this dubious "good support promise". What is it? The answer is simple: exclusivity! i-mate is now working with various hardware manufacturers to release various Windows Mobile phones exclusively under i-mate brand. Previously i-mate was just a distributor of Windows Mobile phones manufactured by HTC only, but now i-mate is planning to use also other manufacturers and to score exclusivity deals with them. The first example is i-mate JAQ Pocket PC phone but on February 2007, at 3GSM 2007 conference (the biggest conference and trade show about mobile phones in the world) i-mate will unveil many more phones not manufactured by HTC and exclusive to i-mate. Interestingly i-mate was present at 3GSM conferences for years - not just one-off presence - and it looks like it plans to continue this presence in the future to come. Since 3GSM is directed mainly at employees of mobile operators, not at end users, it could be that i-mate would like to score at 3GSM some deals also with mobile operators with their new exclusive models! i-mate people clearly exaggerate by calling HTC just a "contract manufacturer" because HTC not only manufacturers but also designs Windows Mobile phones. i-mate has been always trying to exaggerate their role in design of HTC manufactured phones and while at the beginning (HTC Wallaby Pocket PC phone) this role was probably quite big, recently it is second to nonexistent. Conclusion: the promise of providing better support by i-mate has not been fulfilled, and now the only chance for i-mate to survive is to deliver some Windows Mobile phones on exclusivity basis. Eventually i-mate should clearly also improve their support, because at the end it doesn't matter what CEO thinks about competences of his employees, if end customers if i-mate are not satisfied with it, and thus see no reason why they should pay premium price and use yet another middleman between them and the manufacturer! Difficult times are head for i-mate and at 3GSM 2007 we will see whether i-mate has anything to offer to survive long-term... 
(CEO of i-mate - Jim Morrison - minutes after we carried out interview with him at 3GSM 2006) Please observe: unlike most other web publications, we actually are going ourselves - usually as accredited press - to many conferences and trade shows, including above mentioned 3GSM. This is also one of several reasons why we provide original information and first-hand reports. Some readers fail to undersand it, so we find it worthwhile to remind it hereby.  Post your comment (free registration is required to post, but if you register you can edit your posts later) [ 6 Comments ]
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