Garmin makes the best portable navigators out there. Millions of people, including me, are fans. But following notoriously lengthy delays, the first Nuvifone should have been euthanized, not put on AT&T shelves next to the iPhone—for $100 more.

The Nuvifone G60 GPS phone is out this week for $300, an absurdly high price for even a smartphone in this age. But the Nuvifone is not a smartphone, not even a clever one.

What’s Bad

• The resistive touchscreen reminds me of phones circa 2006, bad for everything but big-button tapping.

• There’s no homescreen button, to quickly take you out of a mire of menus.

• It’s crashy—screens froze twice while I was writing this, forcing a full-on hard restart.

• Sometimes the accelerometer just stops working completely.

• The camera is terrible—if the hardware button required for the shutter even works—and there’s no video of any kind.

• The web browser is all but useless, because it relies heavily on zooming in and out, and the touchscreen easily confuses swiping and tapping.

• The interface looks cool at first, but there are strange design choices throughout. Want an example? The QWERTY keyboard only appears in horizontal mode—it’s ABCDE in vertical mode. Also, no “Where To?” button, a la older Nuvi devices.

• You have to pay a $5/month premium charge to check the weather, traffic, local events and other services—all of which can be found on free apps from real smartphone platforms (not just iPhone).

• Even when using email (let alone calendar), there doesn’t seem to be any awareness of the rest of the internet: The email wizard lets you enter any address and password, but it doesn’t say whether it can actually get mail. This tenacious little phone is still trying to log onto my Hotmail account.

• The battery ran down completely during my first day of testing, after a few phone calls and some modest GPS navigation, and the battery indicator drops fast when it’s just on standby. In fairness, you shouldn’t use this phone or any other phone without a car charger, if you intend to use it for GPS navigation.

• There is no car charger. It’s missing the $7 USB-to-cig-lighter adapter. AT&T probably wanted to sell it separately, but when I asked at my local AT&T store, they didn’t even carry it.

• Since it’s an AT&T phone, it has to compete with the iPhone and other handsets that are way better. If the Nuvifone were on Verizon, it would at least have a network advantage in certain markets that it could lord over the iPhone herd. But even Apple haters would have a hard time spending an extra $100 on this—with the exact same phone reception.

The Verdict

Unlike most reviews, this verdict isn’t for you. If you made it to the end of the headline, you already know what to do. But because I care, I thought I’d say something to the makers:

Garmin: Please get your act together in the phone space. You have two choices: Either make tidy useful navigation apps for the major platforms, or make real phones. There’s no such thing as a PND that also makes phone calls (though I think that was the original plan for the G60).

You are great in your field, but even teamed with Asus, you aren’t better than the lowliest phone maker, so you have to play catchup: Pick a mobile OS and stick with it. Skip Windows Mobile (for now) and make a serious push into Android. To do that, you’ll have to see what everyone else is doing. Don’t just set yourself up to lose in the end to an HTC running a TeleNav or TomTom app. You’re good at making tough hardware, so why not differentiate with a rugged outdoor Android smartphone?

I urge you to re-consider your premature departure from the mobile app business. Garmin brand equity would sell a lot of iPhone apps, especially if they came with the Nuvi interface most people love more than TomTom’s or Navigon’s. It may bruise the ego a bit to focus on software instead of hardware, but I just don’t see how successful you can be by doing what everyone else is doing, only later and worse. I didn’t mean to be this harsh, but I also didn’t expect the G60 to be so bad.

In Brief

The home screen is cool for a dumbphone, with three major buttons and a slider of auxiliary options


The navigational experience I have enjoyed on regular Nuvis is here, almost completely intact, but since you can already get that without buying this phone, it’s not a major plus


See above—like, every single word of this piece

Can you believe it? No, seriously — can you believe it? Nearly two full years after its surprise introduction to the world, the nüvifone G60 is finally coming to US shores. In an official press release outed today, the Garmin nüvifone G60 has been blessed with an October 4th launch date on AT&T. Oddly enough, nary a mention of “ASUS” or “Garmin-Asus” is found, but regardless of semantics, you can bet that it’ll be looking for buyers this Sunday. The internal GPS chip and 3 megapixel, auto-focusing camera will enable users to geotag photos and emails and navigate using the same heralded user interface that folks rely on today with the company’s standalone PNDs. You’ve already pounded the specifications into your head by now, but the last figures you’ll need to know are these: it’ll run $299 on a two-year agreement after a $100 mail-in rebate, and if you’re hoping to access Premium Connected Services — which includes traffic updates, white pages, weather, movie, local events and fuel price content — you’ll be forking out $5.99 per month after the 30-day trial expires. So, after all of this, who’s in?

Filed under: Cellphones

Garmin nuvifone G60 officially coming to AT&T: October 4th for $299 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Let’s just be brutally honest here: Garmin-Asus’ nuvifone G60 is basically the Duke Nukem of phones. We’ve been following it since before Garmin and ASUS formed their joint venture, since before we had an inkling of what carriers might pick it up, and before other models running other platforms got thrown under the nuvifone branding umbrella. It’s been a heck of a ride — a ride that seemed exciting for the first year or so, but at this point, the phone’s stretched our patience to the breaking point and set expectations so unrealistically high that it seems virtually impossible that a US launch could quench our thirst for awesomeness. The world will never know with certainty what took so long — maybe it was met with a lukewarm response from carriers, maybe the formation of the joint venture set everything back a bunch of months — but whatever the case, it looks like we’ll finally be able to navigate the G60 right into our hands come October 4 on AT&T. With triband HSDPA, a 3.2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and microSD expansion, the phone really doesn’t scream “high end,” but AT&T must think that the promise of an authentic Garmin nav experience is enough to command a hefty premium because a two-year deal is going to run $299.99 with a required $30 data plan — and that’s after $100 mail-in rebate. Follow the break for a gander at AT&T’s G60 FAQs for salesfolk.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

Continue reading Garmin-Asus nuvifone G60 finally ready for AT&T: $300 on October 4?

Filed under: Cellphones, GPS, Handhelds

Garmin-Asus nuvifone G60 finally ready for AT&T: $300 on October 4? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

The Suzuki SX4 is a low-end economy crossover with some pretty advanced tech built-in, including a removable Garmin navigation system with the same robust feature set you’d expect from a regular standalone PND. However, that doesn’t mean the two manufacturers thought everything through. As Edmunds.com found during its long-term test, the unit lets you issue voice commands, and can also stream MP3s from an SD card through the stock car stereo.

So far, so good. But it’s not so simple; first, the unit can’t play anything imported in the default iTunes AAC format and only works with MP3s. Not only that, but you must navigate through many submenus to get to the MP3 player. That’s still not the end of the world–until you cue up a song.

Once you motor away from a stop, that’s it; the system locks the Garmin down into “Safe Mode,” which is intended to prevent you from controlling the GPS while driving. Except that it also takes away control of the MP3 player! Plus, if you choose a song and then set out, it will only play that one song–it doesn’t move to the next one automatically. And it won’t let you re-establish control of the MP3 player unless you stop the car, or pull the unit out of its housing and reseat it. Priceless. (Thanks to Warren W for sending this in)

News of Garmin’s nüvi 1690 took an unofficial route and managed to find its way to us a few weeks ago, but the official press release took a little longer, arriving this morning and confirming that the connected device will be available sometime before the end of the year at an MSRP of $499.99. For that you’ll get two years of the Garmin nüLink service, including such niceties as Google local search, white page listings, real-time traffic and flight status updates, and the Latitude-like Ciao service, which would enable you to snoop on your friends’ locations from afar. The 1690 even hops on the trendy green bandwagon with an ecoRoute mode that will select the least environmentally destructive route — based on expected speed and acceleration, not on the expected number of critters squashed along the way. Fancy? You betcha, but there’s still no official word on the even fancier 1800-series. Perhaps official confirmation of that device is taking the most eco-friendly route — walking.

Filed under: GPS

Garmin’s nuLink-enabled nuvi 1690 is nuly official originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments