September 11, 2009 [General] | By Edward J. R.Jim Morrison, founder and CEO of i-mate is a nice Scottish bloke and we have met him in person several times.

It looks like it is official. i-mate has closed down and Jim Morrison is missing! He was supposed to have a meeting with the employees on Thursday and when they got there the morning he has locked the office and could not be reached.

Just a reminder: i-mate grew big because of mistake of HTC that was using it as distributor of their own phones, instead of selling them themselves. Then i-mate got crazy thinking that they are actually co-designing these phones and not just selling phones designed by HTC, so after HTC have dumped them they were trying to sell phones of some Taiwanese manufacturers but when they realized that i-mate is not selling that much, they went elsewhere.

We were always finding it funny how Jim Morrison was claiming that he was helping HTC to design their first Windows Mobile phones like the very first Xda for O2 in UK. Unfortunately apart from Jim, nobody else, notably also HTC, was confirming these claims. Then i-mate was trying to use certain enthusiast community website as their support service, but this deal did not work out too. In fact if all you get from a company is seeing their name on the phone but you get no support, no frequent updates, no technical assistance, then why should you buy from them?

Of course nothing is final until it is final but since we have a duty to keep readers informed about Windows Mobile -related stuff, we are just reporting…