Zoombak Retract From The UK

We have been testing and playing with a Zoombak device since we ran the news story recently. A device that is about the size of a fat Zippo lighter with GPS and Mobile phone technology in its guts for £100 plus some few quid a month in subscriptions. We were told it lasts around five days on the batteries inside, standard Lithium I gather. And that one day a model would come out with more posh battery technology. Lithium Polymer is about the tops as far as I know. (Here’s where the forum may well be able to educate me further. Ed)
I sent one off to Brighton with my son after getting a fully tested unit called prdemo38. Although I was able to phone him up and irritate the poor child on his mobile, at no point did it fire up. So they sent me another (prdemo39) and laddie goes off into town on the bus. In a big metal bus and in the shopping centre that is hard to sometimes get a phone line inside of, it was again useless. Although I still phoned him and he hated that.
So I sent him to school with it and this time it worked. With incredible detail, showing four separate locations within the school campus that my son had been at. The system texted me when he came within range of the home zone I had set and I initiated the ‘immediate tracking every five minutes for an hour’ thing and that worked too, showing me how slowly he was ambling home. I would worry about using it for Alzheimer’s patients’ protection or anything that was vital, though as a result.

So I simply could not recommend the thing for those for whom it really matters and was going to run a photograph of the unit fixed to the car cradle on rubber bands strapped to the top of my son’s head like an old handsfree kit as unless it can pretty much ‘see’ the sky like a sat nav, it is a bit crap in the UK.
And you know what, whilst not wanting to risk a huge and litigious fate, I have a personal opinion that the present financial climate is easy to blame but that there really, truly may be issues with GPS reception of the device in these longitudes versus the USA. At which point those who DO know will probably accuse me of the most arrant Internet Conspiracy stuff, but odder things have happened. Maybe that’s why it’s been pulled as I am in the first wave of UK reviews. It’ll peeve Comets, Asda and Maplins I imagine&;.
Minor swag for anyone who can recall and detail by way of the  thread dangling from this story on the forum, who Kinshaw Chameleon were!
  Meanwhile I would have scored it thus:
HMI/Ease of Use                                  6         The website was repetitive and slow and you had to re-log repeatedly
Build Quality                                          8         Rubber armoured plastic box
Ease of Installation                            7         Have to hard wire really
Effectiveness                                        5         Wonderful outdoors, woeful to useless in a bus or shopping centre
Value For Money                                   5         Breakthrough price, if you could only really rely on it
Overall                                                 6.6  
And here is their statement released today&;&;
Global Economic Crisis Forces Zoombak LLC To Close Down Its UK Consumer Business
Zoombak has this month been forced to re-examine the viability and future of its operations in the UK. Zoombak entered the UK market earlier this year (February 08) with a ground-breaking new product – an Assisted-GPS locator which allows consumers to keep track of what is important to them.  Zoombak, a privately held subsidiary of Liberty Media, has already enjoyed proven success with its A-GPS products in the US. Research prior to entering the UK market indicated huge potential for growth here too. 
The UK examination focused on the impact the current economic crisis was having on projected sales and future return on investment in the UK business. It concluded that it was unwise to continue investing heavily in developing and growing a new market in a time of recession and plummeting consumer confidence. Therefore the decision was made to withdraw from the UK consumer market with immediate effect.
European Vice President Barry Wilson comments, ‘When your product category is effectively a new market area, major investment is required to create and develop this market. At some point there has to be a return on that investment. Given these difficult trading times and low overall consumer confidence, it is almost certain that we will not be able to generate a return on the proposed UK investment within an acceptable timescale. We have therefore had to make the very difficult decision to withdraw from the UK consumer market.’
Customers who have already purchased a Zoombak for use in the UK will be entitled to a full refund of the purchase price (£99.99 per unit), which will be provided directly by Zoombak. Any service plan pre-payment will be refunded and credit cards will no longer be billed for any charges. Zoombak has notified all its UK customers of the situation, giving them a 30 day notice period. During this time full customer care services will be operational. More details of the refund scheme are available at www.zoombak.co.uk. ‘We are sorry that we have been compelled to make this decision, and would like to acknowledge all the hard work and dedication put in by the UK team, which was confronted by economic circumstances no one could have foreseen. We also apologise for any inconvenience this causes to our UK customers’, says Barry Wilson.