Just when I thought Garmin was too busy releasing a relentless number of GPS navigation systems, they come out of nowhere with the Nuviphone, a full-blown cellphone based around a GPS core that's set for a third quarter release this year. No word on the carrier or price. With a variety of carriers and manufacturers marketing their own gimpy solutions to GPS on cellphones, what does this phone mean for the industry? Quite a bit, actually.
Garmin is a big name brand in the GPS navigation industry. Arguably, they're the top dog. And when they make a big change, like this one, everyone will take note.
The Nuviphone is another iPhone competitor, but the difference here is that the Nuviphone features full blown GPS and not the triangulation and location-based mumbo-jumbo that the iPhone and many other cellphone manufacturers put out there.
The Nuviphone still has a long way to go, but a release of this magnitude—i.e., a cellphone that one can truly dock in a car and be used for navigation—will ripple throughout the industry and hopefully force other manufacturers to take note and include TRUE GPS (worthy of use in cars for navigation) into cellphones.
The phone itself is the whole enchilada, as far as features go. And in addition to the GPS navigation, the phone includes Google local search and Garmin online services (traffic, weather, fuel prices, etc) that links up with the core navigation system. [Garmin via Giz]