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Comment: Plausible? but rabbit must Hop On ...

Remember the Hokey-Cokey 2000 computer? Remember Gavilan? Remember Poqet? No? No! And you may well soon be able to add the "disposable phone" from Hop-On to that list.

Are we ever going to see a real disposable, $30 phone?

I'll admit to scepticism. I was sceptical before the San Francisco Chronicle opened up a sample Hop-On phone and discovered it was a Nokia. If it does turn out to be a real phone that they eventually ship, with real technology, then I'll be really impressed. But right now, I don't expect to be.

And if it does turn out to be a dud, it won't be the first time. Quite often, a product gets announced, but never ships. Just occasionally, it turns out that this is more than just bad luck.

Gavilan was the most astonishingly good portable computer of the early microcomputer age. It was a startup company, with the newest LCD technology and some wonderful prototypes; and yet, somehow, they could never get a production model built; and in the end, the company went bust having never made anything more than prototypes.

They were probably the most expensive computers ever built, but nobody ever bought one. The investors, of course, lost every cent.

The Poqet was a portable PC, launched around the same time that Atari launched the Portfolio. You don't remember the Portfolio? It appears in the movie Terminator II, where the young John Connor uses it to steal money from a bank ATM.

The Atari machine worked, but it was not beautiful, with an awful keyboard and a restricted display; so the people behind Poqet decided to do it properly, and designed a "no-compromise" PC - small enough to fit in a pocket, but with a full-size keyboard and an 80-column display. Prototypes were built (I even have one!) and then ...

Poqet, like Gavilan, never shipped, despite much hype and endless pre-launch demonstrations. Eventually, the makers had to admit that they couldn't debug it, couldn't build it, couldn't sell it. In that case, unlike the situation with Gavilan, there were loud allegations of deliberate deception - but nothing was ever proved.

The Hokey-Cokey 2000 was a simple deception; a wind-up, if you like. I was the victim; I was working for trade paper Microscope when a disgruntled dealer rang me up and told me he was going to launch something better than all the other ones on the market.

He said he had never intended for me to take it seriously, but when I did (I'd never heard the expression before!) he decided to play it for what it was worth, and ended up with a lovely headline to pin to his dart-board. I gave it front page star status, and ended up with egg all over my face.

And more recently, Motorola designed and built a wonderful Java-enabled cellphone, of which several thousand were built, but the model was cancelled before it reached the shops.

Sometimes you get some clue that the concept is never going to be real. Sometimes, everybody is fooled. With the Hop-On, I have to say, it will surprise me if it ever ships.

The idea of a bio-degradeable plastic case is not utterly far-fetched. The concept of a phone without a dial keypad, using voice-dialling, is perfectly plausible. It might even be argued that there is some way of producing a short-life battery which can be thrown away, or recycled - though I don't know of any such technical breakthrough.

But the circuitry for a mobile phone is pretty much known. If someone really, truly has found a way of making all that for a tenth of the cost of a standard phone, they know something nobody else does.

Me? I think the time has come for the Hop-On people to stop claiming that they have to keep their technology secret, and, if they've got something, show it. They claim to be "light-years ahead of eerybody else - if they really are light-years ahead (do they mean "years ahead" perhaps?) then they must be protected by intellectual property rights.

If this were a game of poker, then I know what I'd say to Hop-On CEO Peter Michaels.

"OK, I'll see you. I think you're bluffing."