Garmin-Asus phones, they're like buses aren't they -- you wait for ages to get one, then two come along at the same time. Seeking to sate as many mobile OS appetites as possible, the partner company has quickly followed up its
A50 Android handset with this here M10, sporting Microsoft's latest Windows Mobile build. As only the
second WinMo 6.5.3 device around, the M10 is as up to date as you can get on the software front, though earlier word of a slightly dated
600MHz Qualcomm MSM 7227 CPU will douse some enthusiasm on the hardware side. Then again, Garmin-Asus do furnish you with 512MB of both RAM and ROM and a decent 4GB of integrated storage, so it's not like this is going to be a slouch or anything, and the 3.5-inch WVGA touchscreen should also do a nice job of displaying the built-in turn-by-turn navigation. Location awareness is said to be ingrained in everything the phone does, with navigation functions attached to the calendar, web browser, messaging and email clients. Launch is slated for the first half of 2010, and you can quite naturally expect us to get all up close and personal with this handset at MWC next week.
posted February 11th 2010 4:51AM
what's next, webOS?
@(Unverified)
gOSgle
@(Unverified) sybian, ...(open source OSs) linux based :P
That processor is so dated and subpar...
Is it just cheap? Is that why manufacturers insist on putting them in their devices?
@r34p3r
This isn't their flagship phone, so yes.
last year a phone with a "MCU" at 600 MHz was OK at 399$ ... today it is 1GHZ ... at 499$
what next...? 1.5 GHz? at 599$???
Why not a real OS on that type of devices/phones?
Why I should pay 599$ on a smart phone with a mini-OS? When I really need at least a "notebook" at 1.6 GHz with a real OS like XP, Win7 or some Linux version...?
Wonder if they actually made it work this time...
The software on this is extremely nice but like everyone is saying the hardware blows..let's hope we can just rip the rom and find a way to put it on any winmo phone :D Rumors are this phone has a new version of garmin for WinMo that has street view and a couple other new features.
"Garmin-Asus phones, they're like buses aren't they -- you wait for ages to get one, then two come along at the same time. "
Pure genius!
Garmin M10 in action
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSearZyxXMI
It will only be sold in Asia. All the maps are loaded on the device and it has all the fucntions of a high end Nuvi.
The joint venture should take a more Sony Ericsson unified approach rather then a more Casio Hitachi splintered approach. They should market as Garmin Asus world wide rather then seperately branding the same devices in different regions, for example; their phones are Garmin in North America and Asus in Asia.
That said, this phone seems to be mid-pack at best and since Samsung and LG own that space with approximately (rough estimate) 12 million competing generic smartphone models. This thing better be cheap to even get noticed amongst them. At least Motorola has made their low to mid-pack smartphones stand out by giving them unique styling (like Devour), but this thing looks like every other cookie cutter smart phone in existence for the last three years.
If Garmin Asus want to be serious players they need to find a second niche aside from navigation which EVERY smartphone on the market does out of the box. They need to either offer unique hardware like Motorola is doing lately, or aim for either the super high end, high margin low volume niche or try to make half a percentage point profit on each unit in the low end but sell 7 million of them. Where they are now dead in the middle they will not even get noticed in the market and will quickly disappear with offerings like this.
Nice...This should make its way to AT&T in March............. of 2011.
Genius, release a custom phone on a dead OS instead of continuing your portability with Garmin Mobile XT. Others are lapping you now by shipping software only solutions to multiple platforms and maintaining the same feature-set.
The other genius is to not update your current XT on Windows Mobile in order to push your dead custom-phone.