A certain type of business is forgotten by history not because it failed but rather because it was founded too early and in the wrong location at the wrong time. That description uncomfortably accurately describes E-TEN Information Systems. The company, which was founded in Taipei in 1985, spent the better part of two decades creating gadgets that, in retrospect, seem less like products of their time and more like early prototypes of something that would become incredibly popular—just not under their name and not until years after they passed away.
The fascinating part of the story begins with the Glofiish line. These Windows Mobile devices, which were introduced in the mid-2000s, packed full internet access, high-resolution VGA displays, and GPS navigation into a form factor that was, to be honest, big by the standards of the time. In 2006, people using Glofiish phones were carrying gadgets that were far larger than what most of their contemporaries thot of as phones. The screens stood out. It had a thick body. The feature set was so extensive that it almost seemed aggressive, as tho the engineers had been handed a list of all the things a mobile professional could desire and instructed to incorporate them all, regardless of the final proportions.
The phablet category will subsequently reinforce this inclination on a vast scale: build it big if it needs to be enormous, prioritize capability over compactness. The tech press spent a lot of time making fun of the first Galaxy Note’s size when Samsung debuted it in 2011. In just two years, one of the most significant product categories in consumer electronics was large-screen phones. After years of maintaining that smaller screens were better, Apple finally released the iPhone 6 Plus. The market had made its decision. Five years prior, E-TEN had placed a similar wager and lost—not because the wager was incorrect, but rather because the software, ecology, and timing weren’t prepared to support it.
The company’s history serves as a helpful reminder that E-TEN wasn’t initially exclusively a hardware company. It spent its first ten years developing products for a particular professional market in Taiwan, beginning with MS-DOS Chinese language software and real-time financial data pagers. The gradual shift toward pocket PC hardware was prompted by the convergence of mobile components becoming sufficiently powerful to make a fully functional handheld computer conceivable. By the time the Glofiish X800 with its VGA screen and complete communication stack was released, E-TEN had gained actual engineering experience in the field; it was no longer a startup making its way into the hardware industry.
The 2008 acquisition of Acer occurred during a challenging period. The Windows Mobile environment that E-TEN had built upon was already starting to appear precarious after the iPhone’s release the year before. Acer acquired the business for about $290 million, which was a fair price considering the manufacturing connections, engineering expertise, and market presence that E-TEN offered throughout Asia. The less pleasant part of the narrative is what Acer did with it later on: absorbing the brand, winding down the Glofiish identity, and integrating the technology into a larger mobile endeavor that never quite found its footing. Within a few years, the E-TEN moniker vanished from shops.
