Aquila Online

I want a Garmin nuvifone

// April 7th, 2008 // News, Tech // 34,938 views

Clearly I’ve been working too hard, ‘cos I missed this news release back in January already. But better late than never to say I want a Garmin nüvifone.

Garmin has gone and created a touchscreen device that combines a premium phone, mobile web-browser, and personal navigator into one sleek package, the Garmin nüvifone. Granted, on looks alone it may not be an i-Phone killer but it is really in a class of its own.

Of course there are numerous smartphones out there that boast GPS capabilities, but what makes this different is that it’s a personal GPS navigator with phone capabilities. This makes it a stronger mix if you consider the main use to be for navigation and not for calling friends. More about that later.

Apart from the personal navigation features (turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions to a myriad of locations and points of interest) it also taps into Google’s local search capability via its web browser, which will sort results based on your current location and relevance.

Talking about phone capabilities, you’d expect it to include personal messaging functions, such as email, text, and instant messaging on top of its 3.5G mobile phone capability, which it delivers with great ease.

A couple of real nifty features include:

• automatically marking the position in which it was last removed from the vehicle mount, so you never loose your car in a parking lot again
• a built-in camera that automatically geo-tags images with the exact latitude and longitude reference of where the image was taken and the ability to email the picture to friends so they can navigate directly to the location
• access to millions of geo-located landmark and sightseeing photographs available through Google’s Panoramio picture sharing site
• a built-in video camera
• MP3 and MPEG4/AAC player
• WiFi, Bluetooth and a 3G (HSDPA) modem

Garmin anticipates that the nüvifone will be available in the third quarter of 2008.

In the meantime, to whet the appetite a bit, check out the nüvifone media gallery and a video of the nüvifone in action

Last but not least, a bit of humour. Watch the Garmin 2008 60-second Superbowl commercial.