Garmin’s GPS-heavy phone comes closer to reality

For more than a year, Garmin—a leading maker of GPS navigation devices—has been teasing us with a touch-screen smart phone, the N?vifone. That's all we knew about it, other than it looked a lot like Garmin's other N?vi products. Garmin would often traipse it around at trade shows and smaller gatherings, but it was always look, don't touch. (You can see it in more detail by clicking on the embedded pictures.)

Yesterday, Garmin, and its new partner, netbook (as in mini-laptop) maker Asus, have brought the N?vifone one baby step closer to reality. Available sometime in 2009, the N?vifone G60 will count heavily on its GPS heritage. It promises one-step navigation from contacts, e-mail and GPS-based Web searches; geo-tagged text messaging, e-mail and photo sharing; Of course, you'll also get audible step-by-step driving or pedestrian directions to your selections, along with options for real-time-traffic information, gas prices, flight times, weather and more.

It will also offer a so-called a “location-based social networking," platform called Ciao! that will put multiple social networks, possibly Facebook and MySpace, under one interface. This sounds eerily like Latitude, a Big Brother application Google announced earlier this week that will allow people to track "friends" via GPS-linked Google Maps on a variety on a variety of cell phones, including BlackBerrys, iPhones, Windows Mobile, and other phones.

Other features include a virtual QWERTY keyboard, support for stereo Bluetooth headsets, 3G and Wi-Fi network connectivity for faster file and Web-page downloads.

No word yet on its price, the cell phone service carrier, or operating system, but it will be a quad-band (world) GSM phone. The only major U.S. carriers that use GSM technology are AT&T, which already has the iPhone, and T-Mobile, which has the G-1, a.k.a. "Google phone."

Besides having the misfortune of facing off against such formidable cell opponents as Apple, RIM, and Palm during worldwide economic downturn, the N?vifone G60 may find itself outgunned by other electronics giants entering the cell-phone arena. Dell and Toshiba, for example, have been flashing smart-phone prototypes of their own to the blogerati.

—Mike Gikas