Rumor: Garmin-ASUS nuvifone G60 to run $300?
By Laura June 
posted Sep 27th 2009 3:46AM
posted Sep 27th 2009 3:46AM
[Via Navigadget]
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hope they've improved the touchscreen. i have a garmin gps and the touch screen is a major fail.
It would have been interesting an year ago.
Now that it has to compete with the likes of HTC's HD2 (Leo) or Archos Android Tablet/phone or Nokia's revamped (v.2.0) N97 or N900, this thing doesn't stand half a chance.
Last spring I would have consdiered as an alternative before buying my (excellent) HTC Hero, now its moment is past, gone and forgotten.
Its ending up just like the Xperia. Released too little too late...
Does anyone know what carriers this phone will be on? Also, any word on its rated battery life? I would hope that a phone with such a dedication to data-intensive applications would have a battery that would be able to withstand such heavy demands.
wow, it's very expensive over at the US. I could get this for $518 in Malaysia without contract.
I assume you mean in 350 Malaysian Ringgit? which would be about US$150.
Now i screwed up, I meant to write 518 MYR
Too little too late.
Nice blog. Informative & impressive content.
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"Rumor: Garmin-ASUS nuvifone G60 to run $300?"
What kind of English is that?
I think it's a bit more than a rumour, as it's retailing for about US$550 in Taiwan http://shopping.pchome.com.tw/?mod=item&func=exhibit&IT_NO=AEAA35-A42967051&SR_NO=AEAA35&ROWNO=14
Why do you care if its off base? Its a proprietary OS (are YOU going to develop for it?) I loved the concept for this phone, and THEN Android came out. Even Garmin/Asus realizes this. Garmin could skin Android to look exactly like this, and who would know? Until you actually started to kick ass with it.
What is a shame... they spent who knows how many years developing their own Linux.. or maybe it was just a port or extension of their own OS that has been on their PND's for years. It's a shame, but still, I cannot wait for their Android phone to come to the US. I also hope they release an app for the android market so we can finally get a real nav app.
I like the emphasis on YOU as if only developers should care about anything like the OS. No, I am not a developer, but I don't have to be one to understand that a proprietary OS means app support is unlikely and very discouraging to developers, especially in such a crowded market.
Yes, a layer or an app on top of Android is the most ideal. I agree that there is just way too many competitors (Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian, WinMo being the main ones, with WebOS emerging) for a new proprietary OS to have any decent chance of being successful. Android seems to be the OS with the greatest chance of growth so far and it seems like it is a perfect fit for Garmin.
Of course that is not to say that necessarily a phone with a proprietary OS won't sell well. It might end up as a dumbphone (no apps) and dumbphones still sell really well, despite how inexpensive smartphones have become.
I was pretty interested in this until I saw the price... however, after thinking about it for a while, we're talking about a device that, even if it was just a standalone GPS would probably cost $200 or so. And it's a "real" GPS, using the legitimate GPS satellites rather than cellular towers to estimate location (which is what most phones with "navigation" features do, and those that I can think of that have legitimate GPS chips tend to be pretty pricey anyway). Plus it looks to be a fairly capable phone. So while it's still a bit hard to swallow, if you don't think of it so much as a phone, but more of a GPS-with-phone-capabilities, it gets a little easier.
What are you talking about? If it says GPS in a phone's spec list, it IS real GPS, plain and simple. And it's a standard feature of pretty much every mid-end phone by now, and has been a standard on high-end devices for well over a year...
Garmin should follow palm's example with the folio and nix the Nuvifone. They should create a $99 Garmin GPS app, and scratch selling hardware. This gadget may have been cool a year or two ago, but has been made obsolete by GPS apps.
Agree with the scratching of this particular phone. Their future exercises on Android might be interesting. Regarding the $99 Garmin GPS app, they already do that, with Garmin Mobile. I have Garmin for blackberry on my curve, and although its a small screen, it works nicely.
It just took them forever to release this, if they had released it on their original schedule it would've been OK, but now it just isn't special to have a phone with GPS, it's rather normal.
@ Tyler
This IS a real GPS unlike other smartphone, iphone, etc. While those phones still have GPS positioning (needed to calculate signal delay from the tower so signals from multiple towers can be combined to provide better signal quality), they do not have onboard maps. The maps are downloaded over a data network, so when you go to a rural area, the navigation stops working. The nuviphone though is supposed to have onboard maps so it can work independently of the cellular network. Considering most GPSs start at about $200, a phone with real GPS navigation for $300 is not all that bad. Once you add the tom tom app ($100) and mount ($100) to the iphone, even that ends up costing over $500, so $300 still looks pretty good.