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i-mate SPL smartphone silently went on sale October 29, 2006 [MS Smartphone] | By Edward J. R. The imitation of Motorola SLVR (L6 and L7) but powered by Windows Mobile smartphone edition and with 2 megapixel camera is now on sale! ... although i-mate didn't even bother to release related press announcement ... It misses out on 3G and Wi-Fi and apart from 2 megapixel camera it is just a mediocre smartphone, but thin design may be appealing to many people... 
It is obvious now that now, when HTC dumped it (to avoid middlemen), i-mate is desperate and to survive it must try harder than previously. By now however all what i-mate is doing is picking existing (!) designs of Windows Mobile phones from various obscure hardware manufacturers from China and Taiwan and trying to sell them under i-mate brand. The problem however is that these manufacturers in most cases are lagging technologically behind major vendors (like Motorola, Samsung and HTC) so even if they offer nice designs, they always miss something: sometimes it is 3G and sometimes it is fast Wi-Fi (802.11g). i-mate SPL is available without subscription for the price of 250 British pounds, what is 50 pounds more than Lobster 700 TV smartphone, although the other one has additionally mobile TV and digital radio on board and i-mate SPL has nothing: no Wi-Fi, no 3G, no nothing - just mediocre smartphone with Bluetooth packaged in a thin design. With subscription i-mate SPL is available "for free" (i.e. assuming you agree to pay monthly fee for 2 years, etc). If Jim Morisson, CEO of i-mate, thinks that now, without support from HTC, he will be able to continue to tell white lies to his customers, like his laughable claims that i-mate is co-designing these handsets, then he is wrong! False claims like "it was designed to be ugly on purpose" or "it's slim and powerful" are easy to recognize as false claims because most of these handsets were designed before i-mate expressed any interest in them, and features (or lack thereof) of these handsets speak for themselves. Situation at i-mate is critical and amateurish web site design (information pages about handsets presented as one big image, instead of text and images combined) is also not helping. That what i-mate needs are handsets that support 3G (not just UMTS but also HSDPA) and that at the same time also offer fast Wi-Fi (802.11g). Without such handsets i-mate is doomed to go bankrupt in 1-2 years. Related links:
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