There she is. 20 months and 1 day after
its original introduction to the world, the Garmin-Asus
nüvifone G60 is at long last in our (admittedly sweaty) palms. The highfalutin' smartphone isn't slated to hit AT&T shelves until this Sunday, but we were able to wrangle a retail unit early in order to bring you a sneak peek at what's to come. Frankly, we've been looking forward to this day for a long (long!) time. We've got a soft spot in our hearts for the Garmin navigation UI, and we have to say, that very same look and feel has been beautifully migrated to the mobile space. Upon unwrapping the phone, we were struck by just how classy the whole thing looks. It's plenty thin for being a GPS-turned-phone, light enough to not weigh you down and sturdy enough to
somewhat justify the
$299 (on contract) price. We did some brief browsing around, and everything felt satisfactorily snappy. The resistive touchscreen had some expected give, but by and large screen presses did exactly what we wanted 'em to in our limited testing. We're aiming to give this bad boy a serious critiquing over the next few days, but for now, feel free to peruse the absurdly detailed gallery below.
posted Oct 1st 2009 12:08PM
I was playing with one of these when it came in at work yesterday.
Snappy UI and it seemed okay at first but WHAT WERE THEY THINKING with the keyboard. I can kindof understand going with a non QWERTY layout on a dedicated GPS unit but with a phone when you expect me to text and email on it? No thanks
@sara
did you rotate the phone sideways? it has a full qwerty.... and you work in a store.. wow.
I did indeed. I still don't see any reason to have the keyboard in that layout in vertical mode. I'll often type one handed and the landscape layout too wide for one hand on my Iphones and winmo phone.. Amazingly I'm the only person who does this as I've observed many customers who never use the landscape layout.
Is it just me, or will At&t ONLY put out new phones that they feel are no threat to their buddy boy Apple? So far they are the only ones w/o an Android phone this year. This is why I'm trading in my Tilt for a Verizon Droid/Tao/Sholes.
That's exactly why I switched to Sprint and got a Palm Pre. Best thing I've ever done,
You couldn't be more wrong. The iPhone is their workhorse, but if you'll notice, you see seperate commercials for the iPhone and AT&T mobile phones, on the at&t commercials you will not see an iphone. It's because they know they are losing grip on it with it's introduction to verizon zoon, and they knwo that they need to focus their advertising away from the iPhone in leiu of other phones they hope to make popular in their lineup. They know their golden pony will be slipping away soon, and yes they could be trying harder. But don't think a nationwide company with analysts and professional advertising agents wouldn't see that inevitability coming.