The
nüvifone G60 took nearly two years to go from
introduction to
on sale at AT&T, and just weeks after its introduction, it has been nearly completely forgotten. Smartphones like Motorola's Droid and HTC's Droid Eris have already snagged the spotlight, and of course, that $300 (on contract) price tag that it debuted with didn't help attract any eyes, either. That said, we're sure at least a few (couple?) of you bit the bullet post-
price drop, and now we're overly anxious to hear how you feel about it. After two years, does this thing really live up to the expectations? Are you satisfied with the navigation capabilities? Is the lackluster battery life worrying you yet? Should Garmin-Asus even bother with a second-gen device? Sound off in comments below!
posted Nov 14th 2009 3:35AM
first
@igor : FIRST to call you.. JACKASS!
Go 1 year back in time and then release it..
you beat me by thaaat much :)
Amen!
Get a life, you idiot.
@Igor : Igor ANGRY!! ooohh... I'm scared! LOL :D
I think the picture with the red bar indicator for the battery says it all.
travel back in time and release it in 2007
well i would bring it to australia for a start so i could look at it...
screw this give me a zune HD in Asutralia
screw this give me a zune HD in Australia
I would also like a proper commenting system
Epic failure as a phone with an epic failure provider. (Nice signal strength, you meant to do that ... right?)
Actually it was mentioned before that the Garmin's overall indicated signal strength was lower than other phones....
I got this phone the other day from amazon. i upgraded from an iphone because it it was pretty boring. Anyways, overall the nuvifone its great. first on the screen, colors are rich, and contrast is solid. The brightness isn't quite as eye-searing as the iPhone at full tilt, and doesn't even approach the supernova 8830 we've got here, but frankly, how bright do you need it? Everything looked sharp and clear, though I've gotten a little spoiled by the iphone's incredible pixel density, and now other phones seem to pale in comparison.
Navigating through menus and the home screen is still very much like an iphone experience though. The phone has two levels of "application" screens, the initial landing screen, which gives you eight app icons of your choosing, and a deeper level which displays all of your folders and programs. You can use the touchscreen to hover (or select) each of the icons, giving it that blue glow, but we found it annoying that you couldn't drag your finger across the selections and have the glow follow you (as it does when typing). It gets stuck on the first thing you touch, and you have to re-press to move to another icon -- it seems like it would be more convenient to have the selection follow your movements, but the phone doesn't seem to know the difference between a quick flick up or down and a selection.
Most components of the UI did require scrolling but don't seem drastically changed from iphone, and you can now jump through lists by up-down gestures. Again, i found that the lack of inertia made this seem stiffer than expected, though it worked well enough when moving around the phone. theres few visual tweaks to the OS , like crossfades and sideways swipes of pages which admittedly give it a bit more polish, although they seem largely superfluous (don't worry, we feel the same way about the iPhone's zooms and scrolls). Overall, transitions between screens and inside of apps do seem a bit more sluggish than the iphone. I whistled for a cab and when it came near The license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror If anything I can say this cab is rare But I thought 'Now forget it' - 'Yo homes to Bel Air' I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8 And I yelled to the cabbie 'Yo homes smell ya later' I looked at my kingdom I was finally there Tosit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Air.
That wasn't even mildly funny. In fact, it was annoying. I was waiting for the punchline, and when you finally delivered it, the only thing that actually made me laugh is that you missed the space between "to" and "sit"
I now feel stupider for reading that comment.
So you upgraded from the iPhone because it was boring but you found the Nuvifone inferior in every way?
Great story, bro.
good, im glad it annoyed you because that was my goal.
Only a moron would trade an iPhone for a Nuvi.
Travel back in time and cancel the project.
if its going to be mounted, at least put a solar charger to offset the mediocre battery life.
That would be great.
Give it to a carrier that can sell it correctly. All AT&T cares about is the iphone; it overshadows all their other phones to the point where all AT&T may as well sell is the iphone. Hell, I've never even seen an ad for the nuvi phone. Not to mention, the phone's functionality is already duplicated on the iphone to boot.
They should have give it to Verizon, or Sprint.
That said, they also took FAR too long to release the damn thing. I heard about the nuvi phone almost two years before it finally hit shelves. Did Garmin think that technology would come to a halt while they took their sweet time? What would have been an amazing phone is now fairly standard.
Hell, when I first saw it in 2007, I thought to myself "I WANT that phone. Right now."
I've seen a commercial for it. It has some teenage girl driving with her friends and it seems the biggest selling point is that you can use the navigation and talk at the same time. Even though you can use the bluetooth and already talk through your Garmin when your cell phone is connected. It's been poorly marketed for sure.
If they want to save the project they have to release it with modern looking Android asap. Otherwise they can close the project.
What does this do that my iPhone won't do better...? I don't get who the heck would pay 300 for something that a 99 dollar iPhone 3G can do.
They could improve this one by canceling it right now before they tarnish their good reputation. With Google looking to shake up the entire GPS world with their free turn-by-turn navigation, Garmin ought to be very careful because a failure with this phone, compounded with Google's free nav, could represent the first stumble down a slippery slope of failure and irrelevance.
I hope google keeps turn by turn an android only app
They are making a version with Android, but by the time it comes out I bet most smartphones will have turn by turn navigation built in.
I think some of the problems with this phone can be found just by looking at that picture:
1. Two bars of signal; AT&T is a bad network
2. Battery icon in the red; Bad batter life
3. + and - zoom buttons; No multitouch zooming
4. The GARMIN logo; Garmin makes GPS devices and Asus makes laptops and such. Neither specializes in phones.
Those four problems and others add up to some pretty big problems for a device that is coming out at the worst possible time.
ASUS makes phones. quite a few...
Asustek will soon make iPhones. They already produce alot of outsourced phone, various WinMo devices for instance.
Asus made some kick ass PocketPCs back in the day.
ASUS makes some kickass stuff NOW
Release it two years ago.
Crap I thought I had a Garmin Phone already??? Cracked GarminXT software on a e71 = nuvifone right? At the very least I have 2010 maps and this G60 surely has maps from 2007.
@Ninja Sherman
Can you point me towards the Garmin XT hack for the E71?
I have been looking for an excuse to upgrade my E71, but nothing except the droid (Shoals) and the jesus phone come close. I would buy the E72 but it looks like the optical D Pad is something to avoid, and the N900's resistive screen has me thinking I will be looking for a physical keyboard the second the reality of no firmware updates sinks in (I have owned my E71-2 for almost 2 years and my serial number has only received 1 firmware update that has been reported to cut battery life by 1/2...No thank you Nokia)
If I want a shinny new handset it looks like I'll be forced to back up all my applications, do a hard reset and pick up a new housing off of ebay!
Turn it into an HTC HD2, it's a far better GPS navigator and a far better phone overall.
i was just woke up from a nightmare which i was in a street protesting walk in tehran against government and i wanted a phone to capture a movie and the first phone that i found was novifune(donno were was mine).suddenly battry runs out after 5 minute movie capturing so i guess they must work on battry,movie quality was not very high so add this one to list too.ooooh my god what a beauty was phone owner....
whattttt?
CHEAPER !!!
How much cheaper than free can you get?
http://9to5mac.com/node/11142
I have played with it for about 10 minutes in the store a couple weeks ago.
The screen resolution is terrible. Its not a particularly good looking phone, black plastic brick.
Let's face it though, this phone is aiming at a small market. If you completely rely for GPS for everything you do, its not THAT terrible. UI isn't as pretty as other phones, but it functioned.
umm... android 2.0
Use a 1 GHZ SnapDragon instead, add HDMI out, make the display 4.3 inches big, add dedicated video hardware acceleration, use a 1,500mha battery, at least 5 mpx cam, 8 GB of internal memory would be okay to keep costs down, attach a bluetooth magnetized querty keyboard that can be removed if u want, have a kick stand pop out the back, sell a smart "smart" car kit a la HTC HD2 separately, and add louder stereo speakers. Also, Make the OS Maemo or Android.
OLED display would be asking for too much right? Seems like only Samsung is getting that right nowadays.
First of all, it should be an Android device imho. And instead of using crappy GPS functionality of the CPU/SOC, use Sirfstar IV instead.
It should have a bigger 4"+ OLED screen like the HTC HD2, either a Cortex A8 or Scorpion (Snapdragon) based CPU, front-facing camera, etc.
Well, I think a single sentence like this should be enough: Make it a competitive top-of-the-liner.
Android. (Which there will be... however) I am looking forwrd to a standalong garmin app for the android.
The biggest improvement would be the price. Now that it's $99 on Amazon that makes it much more reasonable. However, AT&T only lowered it to $199 AFTER the $100 rebate. Battery life isn't great but I use it in the car so it charges while connected to the cradle. I don't like large phones so I don't know about the bigger screens. The web browsing could be improved but I browse on my laptop 99% of the time so it doesn't matter to me but I could see why iphone users wouldn't want it. The G60 feels and looks really great. If Garmin would've introduced this earlier in the year at a lower price point they would've done a lot better. Too much hype with other phones now.