With Garmin-Asus' nüvifone G60
already on sale in Asia, it makes sense to hear that
said smartphone will soon make its way over to North American soil. Of course, it also made sense to think that this thing would be
launching on AT&T about forever and a day ago, so we're not holding our collective breath just yet. At any rate, Garmin recently made abundantly clear on a quarter-end conference call that the GPS-infused handset is in the final testing stages with an undisclosed amount of US carriers, and if all goes well, it'll hit the streets in Q4. What's crazy is that every last specification remains unchanged from when it was announced back in
January of 2008; meanwhile, Apple has shipped two new iterations of its iPhone, Android has blown up significantly and even Motorola and Palm have seemingly resurrected themselves from the grave. Knowing all that, will anyone even bother to show up to snag one in "just a few months?"
posted Aug 7th 2009 4:32AM
IT would be good as a back up, and if its cheap enough (which I doubt) and available from a carrier and is not some small town rural one, perhaps. But, not with At&t. As they suck.
But since this seems to lack Tmobiles 3G band, it is inevitable that it will be coming to att, or some minor carrier elsewhere.
To be fair on one aspect, the nuviphone started out saying it would have a better camera than the iphone did and the iphone is just catching up to everyone else. So they'd be on par with that one. Everything else, however....
It's still something new and different regardless. The GPS feature on it is SO involved in the phone and SO useful. A GPS in your car you may use every day at least a couple times. However, this phone that can get a fix before it even starts up at times, you'll use way more often. It's very convenient to have weather, movie times, and quick and reliable directions, easily. Yes the IPHONE can do these things, but GPS is not near as good. They may have under-estimated the period of time it would take them to get their first phone ready, but that doesn't mean that they don't have something great to offer.
The endless delays have killed this phone for me. I remember being very interested in it in early 2008.