Garmin surprised the world last night by announcing its new Nuviphone. The handset is a solid block with a full touch interface, camera, HSDPA, and, obviously, GPS. That’s about all the details that Garmin released, in terms of technical specifications. Honestly, if the iPhone is any indicator, actual specs don’t really matter much, specifically in the U.S.
There’s three things that are fascinating to me about the Nuviphone. The first is the touchscreen, followed by the software innovations and GPS implementation.
If you think about it, who better to build a fully touch-controlled device than a GPS manufacturer? They’ve been making GPS units for years that are navigated solely by touch (no pun intended). If you’ve not actually used one of Garmin’s touch GPS systems, run yourself up to Best Buy or wherever and play with it for a bit. They’ve had haptic feedback for a while now, and have no doubt studied user interaction with the devices for just as long. Newer devices also connected to your handset via Bluetooth, and allowed you to navigate your phonebook and initiate calls and the like through the GPS unit. Basically all they’ve done is crammed the phone part into the unit, removing the need for a 2nd device. Brilliant.
The software innovations should prove to be really interesting, as well. Photos, apparently, are automatically geotagged in the EXIF data, and can even be stored as visual landmarks. They’ve partnered with Google’s Panoramio to offer visual browsing of Points Of Interest, as well. I’d be anxious to use that in a new city, to get a better idea of the places I would like to visit, and those I could probably pass on. That’s neat.
The GPS implementation will be Garmin’s own, obviously. I recently had a chance to play with this on the N95-3, and it’s amazing. The Garmin Online section features localized gas prices and hotel rates, among other things. If that’s not genius, I don’t know that is.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for this when it’s closer, the due date isn’t till Q3 2008.