Almost a year ago to the day, Garmin announced its first Sat-Nav GPS phone, the Garmin Nuvifone. They never released it, though, and it’s been festering away in their R&D labs ever since. It seems they felt they didn’t have the technical muscle to develop their own phone, so they’ve given the job to Asus. So for this year’s MWC, step forward the Garmin-Asus Nuvifone G60.

Based on the same set of features that Garmin promised us a year ago, the G60 is the first in what Garmin promises to be a range of new Sat-Nav phones developed jointly in a new partnership with ASUSTek.

Will it be any good, though…

With Garmin powering the Sat-Nav side of things, the Garmin-Asus G60 should have all the location-based tech it needs to take on the likes of Nokia in the GPS phone market. It offers turn-by-turn navigation with voice prompts, making it a true Sat-Nav device (or Portable Navigation Device, to give it its formal name), and will come with preloaded maps with millions of different points of interest…exactly like a Nokia GPS phone.

It’ll integrate its location-based features with the Web to enable people to search for companies around a specific location, and obviously get offers from merchants that are local to the user.

In fact, it’s the advertising potential of location-based services that’s really driving the GPS phone market, as everyone agrees that this is where the future of mobile advertising lies. This is why Nokia spent billions buying Navteq, the mapping company, and why Google is ploughing so much money into the mobile space with the GPS-enabled Android phones.

With Nokia and Google fighting over the same territory, not to mention dozens of other manufacturers with GSP phones, Garmin-Asus have their work cut out in making us want their Nuvifone rather than one of their competitors’ phones.

More worryingly, though, is that of all the GPS phones that are currently on sale, Google’s fantastic Maps application beats all of them hands down. I use a Nokia E90, which has a GPS unit inside and Nokia Maps. However, Nokia Maps is slow and pretty ineffective, so I always use Google’s Maps, which is much more useful.

As such, it’s the mapping software on the device that will determine whether the GPS phone is successful or not, and Google has this one covered. All Google Maps needs is a GPS unit to work perfectly (and will even work perfectly well without it), so you have to ask whether a phone with location-based bells and whistles on it is really needed?

We’ll have to wait and see what Garmin-Asus produce at this year’s MWC 2009 event. If it’s only as good as Nokia’s GPS phones, though, it won’t be worth buying, as the Sat-Nav features will be done better by Google, and the phone features will no doubt be done better by any other mobile phone!

Oooh, such cynicism!

[Source: I4U, Slashphone]