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Things between Garmin and ASUS weren’t really working out. They have announced that come January their partnership and ventures into the world of mobile together will come to an end. But ASUS is committed to continue making new Android handsets, and as part of their break-up deal with Garmin they have secured exclusive rights to their navigation software. That may or may not be any sort of competitive edge (we saw how how well Garmin’s navigation kept their Garminfone afloat), but it will still allow the company the ability to offer a deeper navigation experience while hopefully improving other hardware and software aspects that hampered Garmin-Asus-branded devices.
At this point, if ASUS wants to gain any sort of respectability they may do better to ditch all Garmin associations, but we will just have to wait and see what the manufacturer throws at us come next year.
[via Engadget]
Garmin needs to get past the idea of a ‘Garmin phone’ and just put their Mobile XT software on the Market at a reasonable price (they did it for WinMo years ago, so why not for Android?). They would rake it in. I’d buy it immediately.
@Gunner
I totally agree. I would be willing to pay up to $20-$30 for full featured Garmin software including all of the Offline roads, trails, and topo maps available on their own devices.
This is effing stupid. I love the crap out of Garmin’s software; ran Mobile XT on my WinMo devices for years. But like others have said, Garmin needs to realize that their future is in the software NOT THE HARDWARE. The hardware is constantly changing and improving and frankly, they cannot keep up. They would do well to focus on developing software for the various mobile platforms instead of trying to tie in to the hardware. I want my phone to have GPS capabilities, not the other way round. I think that Garmin’s sheer stupidity earns them the right to go out of business. I for one, am done waiting around for them to get their sh*t together.
I totally agree with you guys. I love my droid to death and it pretty much consolidated a lot of my personal electronics into one device, yet I still keep around my Nuvi 760 only because google maps requires internet access and if I want to use GPS and Stream music at the same time I need to use two devices. The Nuvi 760 is nice but I would ditch it in a heart beat if Garmin released a fully featured Android app that stores the maps on the SD card.
Garmin just don’t get it….
I agree with everybody.
Garmin doesn’t want to cannibalize a great GPS market, however they are losing the forest in the trees. The gps market will dissolve should the GPS chips gets ported into other devices. Garmin doesn’t have exclusive deals with chip makers over the gps hardware market. Smart devices are becoming more full function devices. They might as well get onboard with a manufacturer of android devices before the industry overtakes them. No doubt magellan and tomtom are finding parters as I type this.