Fake products are specialty of Hop-ON
Setbacks Delay Arrival Of Disposable Phones
By SARAH MILSTEINMAY 2, 2002
LAST summer three companies said they expected their disposable wireless phones to be in stores by this spring. Whatever else has blossomed this season, though, the throwaway phones have not.
Two of the companies, Dieceland Technologies and Hop-On Communications, say the marketing of their phones has been delayed by the need for Federal Communications Commission approval and arrangements with carriers, among other factors. Neither manufacturer can provide a date by which its phones will be available. The third company, Telespree, says it is not going to offer a disposable phone.
A fourth company, New Horizons Technologies International, says it plans to offer a disposable phone called the Cyclone this summer. The company, based in Orlando, Fla., says it, too, awaits F.C.C. approval.
Typically a manufacturer seeking F.C.C. approval creates and refines a product that it submits to a third-party testing laboratory for certification before applying to the commission itself. A spokesman for the Telecommunications Industry Association, a trade group, said that the complete process, including lab testing, usually takes several months from beginning to end.
The founder of Dieceland, Randi Altschul, a toy inventor in New Jersey, said that her phone was now in the ''tweaking and testing phase.'' Ms. Altschul, who holds patents on several related technologies that she says will allow her to make a disposable phone about the size of a credit card, said that carrier testing and obtaining regulatory approval here and overseas were taking longer than expected.
Hop-On cited similar challenges in putting its technology on the market but has run into other problems as well. On March 29, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that it had dismantled several sample phones stamped with Hop-On's name and logo and found Nokia components inside.
Hop-On's chief executive, Peter Michaels, says that his company had to use Nokia phones to produce its samples because of glitches with its own invention. (He says he has filed a lawsuit against The Chronicle and its reporter on grounds of libel, negligence and interference with contractual relations.) Note, he did not file a lawsuit...another lie.
Hop-On had a distribution deal last fall with Wakefern Foods of Elizabeth, N.J., which runs ShopRite supermarkets in the Northeast, but was unable to deliver the phones. Hop-On acknowledged that a promotional deal with Universal Studios to distribute phones was canceled last fall for the same reason.
