AT&T and Garmin today announced the Garmin nuvifone G60, the only phone to fully integrate a GPS navigator with turn-by-turn voice assistance, data and mobile web. It will be available October 4, only for AT&T customers in the U.S.
The navigation phone will cost $299 with a two year service agreement after $100 mail-in-rebate. Nuvifone Premium Connected Services which includes traffic updates, white pages, weather, movie, local events and fuel price content are available for $5.99/month after a 30-day trial.
The Nuvifone G60 will feature a Linux-based operating system with a 3.5 inch WVGA widescreen resistive touch display, quadband GSM/EDGE and triband HSDPA access, LBS services with preloaded maps, A-GPS support, Bluetooth with stereo audio support, speakerphone, Wi-Fi radio, 3.0 megapixel camera with autofocus and video recorder, microSDHC expansion slot, and HTML web browser.
It has the same core features as a high-end Garmin nuvi and comes preloaded with maps and millions of points of interest (POI) for North America. The device can easily be mounted in the car or detached for portable navigational use.
Navigation device maker Garmin teamed up with Asus to compete with smartphone manufacturers like Apple and Palm which are integrating similar navigation functionality into their phones. The Garmin-Asus alliance combined the two companies expertise.
Nuvifone has navigation maps stored onboard and they can receive turn-by-turn voice-prompted directions that speak street names to millions of destinations. If a turn is missed along the route, the nuvifone will automatically recalculate a route and get the user back on track. The nuvifone has a GPS receiver with Garmin’s HotFix technology and assisted GPS.
The nuvifone also has a “Where am I?” feature so users will know their exact latitude and longitude coordinates, nearest address, intersection, hospital, police station and gas station with one touch of the screen.
For parking, Nuvifone will automatically mark the position in which it was last removed from the windshield mount.
Garmin’s location link, which parses addresses on the web with latitude and longitude information, allows customers to easily navigate to addresses they discover on the web by simply touching the address. A three megapixel camera with auto-focus automatically geotags images. Customers may then save the image so they can navigate back to the location, or email the geo-tagged image to others.
The nuvifone includes free access to AT&T’s Yellow Pages, flight status and converter. Premium Connected Services gives customers subscription access to real-time traffic information, fuel prices, White Pages, weather and more.
In related news, Tom Tom also announced an agreement with AT&T to provide the wireless connection to their dedicated (non-phone) TomTom XL 340S LIVE device, which features Local Search, real-time traffic information, and Fuel Price Service.
Garmin is the market leader in personal navigation devices followed by TomTom and Magellan.
The Garmin-Asus phone is cheaper than buying the iPhone 3GS and its TomTom service/driving kit, notes I4U.com. The TomTom car kit for the iPhone costs USD 119.95, available this October, will be sold separately from the $99 TomTom application (which requires a $200 iPhone, of course). It is compatible with the iPhone 2G, 3G and 3GS.
Walt Mossberg reviewed popular iPhone Navigation Apps.
None of the apps stood out as much better than the others at navigation, says Mossberg, though they have different styles and features:
- TomTom for the iPhone: The U.S. and Canada navigation app costs $100 and takes up a 1.2 gigabytes of space on your phone. But there is no subscription fee and the maps are always present.
- Navigon MobileNavigator: This app costs $90, and it takes up 1.3 GB on the iPhone because it also stores all the maps. There is no recurring fee.
- AT&T Navigator: Downloads maps and info on the fly, but it takes up less space on the phone—just 2.3 megabytes. That means you need a good connection at the start of a trip. Though the app download is free, a $9.99-per-month subscription fee will automatically be added to your AT&T account.
- MotionX-GPS Drive: The main screen has a clever menu arranged in a circle. It’s also fairly small—just 10 megabytes or so. But it must download maps and other info each time you start a route. Drive also is potentially the cheapest of the four apps. It will cost $1.99 and include a 30-day free trial. After that, it’s $25 a year.
But by 2014, the numbers will flip: 305 million smart phones will be in use, versus 128 million PNDs.
Today, roughly 2 million iPhone owners used navigation features on their handsets, according to a iSuppli. That’s about 4% of the total number of standalone GPS devices. By 2013, iSuppli sees 28 million iPhone owners using the navigation features, or roughly 38% of the expected 72 million GPS devices Gartner sees in production that year.
