The Group was launched by James Morrison, who began his telecoms career at sea designing and installing fiber optic cable systems with Cable & Wireless and was head of the team at O2 that designed the first O2 Xda Pocket PC phone and started Microsoft in the mobile software industry.

imate used HTC as their manufacturing partner for 22 handsets, It was based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and operated in the UK, Italy, Armenia, Australia, India, the U.S. and South Africa.

The i-mate Intelligent which was supposed to be a 4.7-inch handset running the desktop OS on a Clover Trail CPU with 2 GB RAM and 64 GB storage, an alleged functioning prototype has never been shown to the public as of November 2017 and after MWC 2013 the device didn't make any further appearance one way or another.

[2] From the beginning of its existence in 2001 until fall of 2006, imate sold branded versions of Pocket PCs, PPC phones, and smartphones manufactured by Taiwanese HTC.

This was announced soon after HTC started selling devices under its own brand name in Europe and purchased the PPC/smartphone distributor Dopod which serves Asia and Australia.