On February 4, 2009 Garmin made a huge announcement about its current partnership with ASUS to “jointly develop, manufacture, market, distribute, and support co-branded mobile phones.”
This is an exciting development as we are all waiting for the release of the Garmin Nuvifone which is slated to come out any day now. The mission of the partnership between Garmin and ASUS is to offer a line of handsets that provide “social and business functionality” to everyone regardless of class, income, lifestyle, or age.
But why a GPS enabled cell phone, or a GPS smartphone? We have many theories as to why and Garmin has many researched facts as to why. From our point of view as a consumer, GPS Smartphones are very much needed in today’s market. Everyone wants everything on their cell phone. Wouldn’t be amazing if instead of having to buy a smart phone and a portable GPS system; that when you get in the car you could just mount your cell phone an use it as a GPS while still making and receive calls?
That’s exactly what Garmin sees, according to a Canalys forecast “20.4 million integrated-GPS smart phones will shipped in North America in 2008″ and that will rise 85% in three years. That’s a huge percent, basically 57.2 million smart phones shipped in North America alone. They also predict a drop in basic handsets.
So what can we expect? Well Garmin-Asus, as the collaboration is called, will launch several models of the nuvifone this year, the first to be introduced next week Mobile World Congress in 2009.
Stay tuned here for the second part in this series were we delve deeper into the Garmin nuvifone expectations as we wait for February 16 - 19, the first release of the Garmin nuvifone.