Handtops, UMPC - The Motorother Talktouch - Talkabout, Brother, Motorola, Flipstart

What happens when you're a VC backed company that is looking for a good design engineer to finally develop the product of your dreams, but you realize that the best device designers are already employed at Apple, OQO, etc? Well, the choice is obvious... you start headhunting at less popular companies... or at least at companies that are known for making good products, but not exactly the best looking ones.

And thus, at the local job fair immediately following CES you learn that the guy who designed the keyboard layout of the Brother P-Touch Label Maker is looking for a less dead-end career...

And a few months later you're at the local Starbucks watching Britney get her 1100 calorie Frappuccino after she ditches rehab again when you bump into your old college buddy who, last you heard, was working at Motorola. And during a quick "what are you up to these days" chat over mocha's, you learn that Motorola has gotten so big they forgot all about pagers and the designer of the Motorola TalkAbout (and your old college buddy) is also looking to make a career change...

So you hire them both, offer them lies veiled as promises about a future IPO and retiring as millionaires in five years, then lock them in a closet together with instructions not to leave the closet until they've succeeded in creating the device of your dreams. Every six months you check on their progress, then put out a press release and sometimes even a few images. You even tease the world with the promise of a webcam in the closet, but no one outside your super secret company ever actually gets to see it...

Almost four years later, the two emerge and its plainly obvious that there was no innovation, no imagination, but rather just a perfect merging of the devices each had designed in a past life. But after 4 years of promises, paychecks, and venture capital, its not like you can just walk away and invest your money in an OQO. Nope, you gotta show something for the last four years of time. And, thus, is born the Flipstart (aka: the Motorother Talktouch):

<br>Of course, both the P-Touch and and Talkabout had better battery life. The Talkabout was known to last two weeks to a month on a single AA battery. The P-Touch can last weeks to months as well. Yet somehow in all that super secret design conundrum, battery life dropped to a measly 5 hours on an "extended" battery and 2 to 3 on a "standard/slim" battery. Oh well, such is the state of electronica today...