You’ve probably never heard anything about Garmin-Asus before. They’re hardly what you’d call a big name in the mobile phone world. Well, the two companies, Garmin from the world of sat-navs, and Asus from the world of teeny-weeny laptops, joined forces not too long ago, in an effort to bring smartphones to the market that had GPS and sat-nav at the core of their existence.
It has to be said that the Nuvifone models they’ve come up with look really rather nice… or, at least, one of them does…
The Windows Mobile-powered Nuvifone M20 over there unfortunately comes across as a pretty below par WinMo phone, having only a 2.8 inch screen (compare that to the 4.1 inches on the Toshiba TG01), and just 3G, not HSDPA… although the sat-nav would’ve been worth it (if the damn thing had a bigger screen, that is).
Ah, but the Nuvifone G60, that’s an entirely different beastie, and a far more exciting one, to boot. Not only is the screen a lot bigger, at 3.5 inches, but the G60’s got proper HSDPA, the same sat-nav software you get in a standalone Garmin GPS box, TWO GPS receivers (so it works equally well as a sat-nav in portrait or landscape mode) and something else. A brand new, never before seen operating system, running on Linux, much like Google Android without the Google.
Now that is something to get excited about, which makes it even more of shame that, according to IntoMobile, both Nuvifone models have been delayed, possibly until next year.
Damn.
Of course, let’s hope that the market they’re going for, being VERY focused on location awareness, with things like geotagging, and that all-conquering sat-nav, stays the way it is now, because otherwise, with just about every new phone you can think of coming out with GPS, the Nuvifone range is gonna have a hard time competing…
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