Wireless News

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.

It looks a bit like the Sidekick’s evil big brother, but i-mate’s Ultimate 9502 is an altogether more serious beast than the T-Mobile messenger. Sitting pretty at the top of i-mate’s range, the 9502 is a quadband GSM Windows Mobile smartphone with HSDPA/HSUPA, WiFi and Bluetooth, as well as a full VGA touchscreen, integrated GPS and full QWERTY keyboard. Aiming to replace your notebook, the 9502 also supports Direct Video Out, so that you can connect a full-sized monitor for writing and video conferencing.

The Ultimate 9502 has 256MB ROM and 128MB RAM, a 3-megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash, Bluetooth 2.0 and it uses a 400MHz Qualcomm MSM 7200 chipset. There’s a front-mounted VGA camera for video calls and a 2.5mm socket for headphones.

i-mate are yet to reveal pricing or availability for the Ultimate 9502.

The Ultimate 9502 is i-mate’s second new handset of the day, the Ultimate 8502 a more traditional candybar smartphone has a 2.6-inch QVGA touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, triband HSDPA/HSUPA and quadband GSM, together with WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR. i-mate have also packed GPS and the Direct Video Output for hooking up external displays to this Windows Mobile 6 Pro handset.

A 2-megapixel camera with fixed-focus and LED flash are a giveaway that this is very much intended as a business handset; hence the push-email and full Microsoft Office Mobile suite. It won’t cause too much of a bump in your suit jacket, either, at just 15mm thick. The 8502 uses the same 400MHz Qualcomm chipset and 256MB RAM/128MB ROM as the 9502, with a microSD slot to expand the memory.

i-mate are yet to announce availability or price for the Ultimate 8502.