Each and every time we had to write an article about Modu it has always left a bad taste in our mouths. From the beginning we knew that the company was created merely to swindle investors out of their money and that the products they showed off not only made very little sense, but were also never going to see the light of day on any store shelf in any territory. As far back as 2008 the company was laying people off, and recently they failed to make their company public, but now we’re finally glad to tell you that we’ll never have to write about Modu again. That’s right, the company is going die. By the time next month Modu will be no more.
Reports out of Israel say that Modu currently owes around $123 million to investors and another $21 million to the Israel Discount Bank. The people who worked there will also have to fight to get their salaries. All because a few guys sitting around a table thought that the concept of a modular mobile phone would be a wild success, when in reality the invention of the SIM card was the best implementation of making it easy for consumers to pick the devices they want.
Operators will soon transition to microSIM cards and that’ll enable form factors that are even sexier than the ones we have today. Modu devices on the other hand needed to be slipped inside a bulky shell. The goal for Modu was more to create an ecosystem around their proprietary dock connector, similar to how Apple has done, than to actually make something new and innovative. We’re not going to miss these guys, not one bit, and while we do feel bad for the employees who have lost wages, it didn’t exactly take a rocket scientist to know that Modu was a dodgy company.