By Garmin – off of the heals of their poor performance in the United States market with the T-Mobile Garminfone – aren’t slowing down as they’re taking their Android-based Garmin business elsewhere: to Taiwan. The Garmin-ASUS A10 will have a 3.2-inch HVGA touchscree, a 5-megapixel camera, 512MB of RAM, and will come preinstalled with Android 2.1 and Garmin’s custom GPS-centric user interface. It’ll run you about NT$13,900 which translates to about $434 here in the states. We’re not sure what kind of market Taiwan has to adopt this thing, but here’s hoping this launch goes much better than their United States endeavors.
[via Digitimes]
Color me skeptical but: why do we want Garmin to succeed at charging for a service we get for free from Google and bundled into yet another custom Android deviation to continue to fracture the space?
If they have a better map system they should sell it on the android market. Leave it 2.1 compliant if you must, but lets get a heavy vendor in the app market would be much more beneficial to all. Maybe their dashboard mode or street level navigation is way better and its worth a few extra bucks? But I”m not getting them embedded in my OS where I can’t uninstall if they suck.
The GPS chip and software in any phone is not even close to as powerful and nice and accurate as that in a Garmin GPS unit. Thats why. I have GPS on my iPhone and it works…most of the time…except when I lose service-which is when I need it most. Additionally Google Maps requires data connectivity in order to give your phone a map to place that little GPS dot on, otherwise phone just gives you GPS coordinates, there is no base map installed on the phone itself so when you lose data coverage you lose your base map. You can download a basemap for a large fee online to your phone, but even then its not as nice as a standalone Garmin unit. No phone has a GPS as good or better than a standalone unit from Garmin. I havent used the GArmin Asus phone but Suspect that is the only phone with equivalent GPS functionality-is a shame it failed so bad. If I could get specs from the Evo or Epic in an Garmin phone it would be a no brainer for me and many others I am sure.Someday…
You would think a company like Asus would be able to pump out better hardware (specs wise) than something like this.
I’ll tell you why it failed. Because the specs for the phone were so obsolete when it came out, that nobody wanted to waste all that money for an oudated phone with a little better GPS. The AGPS in most phones works great. It does the job. My G1 had an excellent GPS system in it. I never got lost. The only time you would need something more than what they put in the average smart phone, is if you were out of range of a data connection. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not going on a safari any time soon, so why the hell would I need anything more than the AGPS in my phone? And if I did plan on going somewhere out of range of a data connection, then I would plan accordingly and get a REAL GPS…not a GPS/phone combo. If you were in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have a data connection for your AGPS in your phone, then you wouldn’t have text, internet, voice, etc. anyway. So there would be no point in having a damn phone in the first place.
Quote Contraus “If you were in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have a data connection for your AGPS in your phone, then you wouldn’t have text, internet, voice, etc. anyway. So there would be no point in having a damn phone in the first place.”
This comment really made me sit up and reconsider. I am about 80% decided to go get the Android 2.1 version of A10. The 1.6 version did very badly because of various functional issues with the UI. I was hoping the lessons learnt from the 1.6, this latest 2.1 reincarnation will be rid of them.
It would be suicidal to relaunch basically the same phone even with a latest OS version if the problems with Garmin relate layer software not integrating well with 1.6 were not fixed.
Asus has more to lose if this new re-launch does not work out.