i-mate, we hardly knew ye

There have been rumours for more than a year that i-mate, the Dubai-based smartphone maker, is approaching its demise. This month, the rumours stepped up a notch, and last week

, a Dutch mobile site.

There's still no official confirmation, but the situation is looking grim. Obviously, saying a company has closed its doors is a pretty serious statement, so we are going to hold out until we get something reliable. But the company's phones are being redirected to a single voicemail message, its tech support number is no longer answering, and their offices in Dubai Internet City seem to be closed - nobody has answered knocks on the door for a while.

As you can see from the photo on the left, taken at around 2pm today, this does not look like the main entrance to a working office. (Pic by Sarmad Khan / The National).

Today,

that the company is bust, quoting a retailer who says his contact at the company confirmed that it has shut down, and saying staff were told at a meeting last week that it's all over. It's all anonymous sources for now, but ITP have done some decent digging, and I imagine we will get some confirmation of this next week after the Eid holidays.

For a while in the mid-2000s, i-mate were a real competitor in the smartphone market, and had some

, back when HTC were their manufacturer. But then HTC decided to go it alone and sell phones under their own brand (which has worked out pretty well) and i-mate never really recovered.

It goes without saying that i-mate benefited from the lack of serious competition - back in 2004, if you wanted a phone with a big screen, web browser, email etc, you either had to go for a Nokia Communicator or a BlackBerry, and back then i-mate's phones could compete with both. With Apple, Palm, Android, Blackberry and Nokia all stepping up their game, this is now a market that you need to take extremely seriously to have a chance in.

I would also like to use this as an opportunity to get something deeply personal off my chest.

Shortly after I moved to the UAE for the launch of The National back in the beginning of 2008, i-mate's PR company (Hill and Knowlton at the time) sent me an i-mate that we could use as a competition prize / givaway etc.

That phone

and it was one of the worst smart phones I have ever used -  so bad in so many ways that it made the N97 seem like an iPhone.

It was junk in every way, from the cheap, flimsy plastic casing to the horrible keyboard, tiny screen and Windows Mobile operating system that came straight out of a horror movie (opening the web browser was the mobile equivalent of running up the stairs and locking yourself in the en-suite bathroom as the hooded killer calmly follows).

Here's how bad it was: I didn't want to curse some poor competition winner with it. So I put it in my desk drawer, where it has sat for the last 18 months. My guilt, and the occasional sense that I should disclose this lack of giving away to the PR people, has been a small but real weight on my conscience. That weight is slowly lifting.