A New Mobile Partnership

In January last year, one of the world’s leading GPS-device manufacturers Garmin announced that it would soon release a mobile phone. Back then, the company showed journalists a prototype of its Nuvifone, a full touchscreen phone ala Apple’s iPhone, but with integrated Garmin GPS software.

More than a year later, Garmin announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has forged a partnership with Taiwanese tech firm Asus, the makers of the Eee PC, to design and manufacture a line of mobile phones.

The original Nuvifone was renamed as the Garmin-Asus NuvifoneG60. The device retained most of the prototype’s features and design elements, and will still be the first phone that will be released to the market.

More interesting though is the newer Nuvifone M20. The M20 is a Windowns Mobile 6.1-powered device that has a VGA (640×480) resolution touchscreen, a 3 megapixel camera, 256 MB of RAM, 256 MB of ROM, 4 GB of internal storage, an accelerometer, and a Qualcomm7200A chip running at 528 MhZ.

The Garmin-Asus partnership joins a long list of manufacturers and phone-makers like Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Nokia, and many others trying to compete against Apple and its now dominant iPhone platform.