Hop-On Flop

Think E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial had a tough time phoning home? Try being one of the 1000 seemingly lucky consumers who won a disposable cell phone with the DVD purchase of another Steven Spielberg production, “Jurassic Park III.”

The much-advertised “Survival Phone Promo” was a joint venture between Universal Studios and Hop-On.com, a Garden Grove, Calif.-based developer of disposable mobile phones. The company already was the subject of considerable media hype: Time Magazine named the phone one of 2001's “Inventions of the Year.”

Hollywood bought into the buzz (let us now take a moment to savor the sweet irony of Tinseltown getting suckered by someone else's hype machine), and when the so-called “JP3” made its way to DVD, an estimated 1000 copies included coupons awarding a free Hop-On phone.

But in a moment of pathos and heartbreak akin to the moment when E.T.'s cute little pal Elliot Schindler was eaten by Jaws while searching for the Temple of Doom — sorry, all those Spielberg movies kinda blur together after awhile — Hop-On failed to deliver the phones by the promised May 17 deadline. At that point Universal finally threw in the towel, instead offering contest winners a check for $30, the phone's projected retail price.

It was the second major misstep by Hop-On in a matter of months. When the San Francisco Chronicle took apart some demo models of the phones, the paper discovered the company's so-called “innovative, technologically advanced” product was actually assembled from old Nokia 8290 parts. Worse still, at press time Hop-On still didn't have FCC approval to manufacture the phone. (No word on whether the company thought it could use approval granted to Nokia for that as well.)

So caveat emptor, baby. There may someday be a market for disposable cell phones, but with onetime pick-to-click Telespree shifting its business focus and moving out of the disposable market altogether, and other would-bes like DieceLand and New Horizons Technologies stuck on the launching pad, that day isn't coming anytime soon.

With the promise of 3G on the horizon, and with handset prices continuing to drop, it seems rather unlikely that a $30 phone with the limited technological capacity inherent in the disposable phone model will ever be of interest to the general public. But browbeat them long enough, and sooner or later they're bound to give in.

And in a related note, Spielberg is reportedly set to greenlight “Jurassic Park IV” any day now.