Gadgety News

The swines!

The people over at Laptop Magazine have not only managed to get all over the Garmin Nuvifone prototype they’ve rubbed our noses in it and posted vids and pics aplenty (links at bottom).

The good thing for us lot is that we can see the UI in action :0)

They say that the screen is nice and big, and the User Interface appears to be very GPS-centric.

On using the QWERTY keypad they reported it as ”spacious enough” and uses an “auto-complete dictionary” (predictive text).

The main page is pretty well set out with a row of icons for calling, searching, and mapping, and finger swipes stream them across the screen.  Smooooooth.

On the device that was tested the applications seem to be SMS, Google Search, email and media player.

Apparently some apps didn’t load properly and some of the display units were frozen in a borked limbo state.

But, as I said earlier, this is a prototype version and I’m sure (hope) that Garmin will have sorted all this out before the release in the 4th quarter of the year.

Still unsure that the $500 price tag is fixed or that it shall also be available in white.

Laptop Blog - Handson With Nuvi 

Laptop Blog UI Action Vid

Here’s a turn up - we’ve seen plenty of phones with GPS so now Garmin have gone all flip-reverse on us and released a phone!

It’s a handsome beast to be honest and has really come up to the big boys and said - “whatcha got?”

The ‘nüvifone’ can be best described as an iPhone-alike that incorporates the bits that Apple forgot; like 3G mobile broadband connectivity and full blown GPS (natch).

It comes as no surprise that including GPS was a foregone conclusion as Garmin is pretty clued up in this area.  Included are maps of North America and Eastern and Western Europe as well as millions of POIs and turn-by-turn voice prompted instructions.

They’ve even thrown in Google’s local search so you can search using phrases like ‘kebab’ or ‘Spearmint Rhino’ and the results will come up based on current location and relevance.

You also get access to ‘Garmin Online’.  This gives you up-to-date info such as real-time traffic, fuel prices, stock prices, sport scores, news reports, local events and weather forecasts.

All of that would be pretty special even in an average looking chasis - but the big G has only gone and wrapped all that in an iPhone-sized body with a 3.5″ finger nav touch screen!

The interweb is cruised using a Mobile Safari-esque full page rendering web browser.  You also get email client, a digital camera and support for MP3, AAC and Mpeg4 multimedia formats. 

You can also record vid clips, send MMS, Instant Messaging and there’s automatic location tagging on all photographs.  Audio is via the standard 3.5mm headphone jack.

Expect to see it around Autumn-time - I think that should give Apple a chance to step up its game………………