Garmin-ASUS Partnership Bringing You M10 Nuvifone

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Garmin, the maker of fine aviation electronics and the pioneers of GPS equipment, first partnered with Tawianese electronics giant ASUS last year to create the first iteration of their nuvifone. They’ve now taken the covers off of the newest edition of the nuvifone, and it’ll feature a 3.5-inch touchscreen.

Unfortunately, the Garmin-ASUS still see fit to include the dreadful Windows Mobile on their nuvifone, and it’s not even the hotly anticipated Mobile 7 or version 6.6 (which, allegedly will be optimized for touchscreens) – it’s instead, version 6.5, which features a few improvements for touchscreens. To their credit, the pictures of the N10 are showing a nice UI, so perhaps they’ve added some new touches.

For hardware, it has the aforementioned 3.5-inch touchscreen screen, which is the same size as the iPhone and Nexus One. For a camera, it’s got a 5-megapixel camera, and will feature a pairing of 512MB of RAM and 512MB of flash storage for your media – and an included microSD slot will help with that.

They’ve thrown in a Qualcomm MSM 7227 processor (with a clock speed of 600MHz) which is being lauded by the tech press for being a low-end choice. A positive is since it isn’t running the iPhone OS or Android, they won’t be running apps to bog down the processor (I kid).

The device will also include Garmin’s GPS navigation software. A huge pet peeve of mine is that the Global Positioning System, a service to humanity provided by the US Air Force, requires no monthly fee, but many mobile phone providers get away with charging $10 a month to their customers for the right to use their phone’s aGPS chip. Thankfully, Garmin (one of the first companies to produce GPS receivers) has included free GPS software to buyers of their phone.

The bad news is that the phone is only being offered in Taiwan, and will only include Taiwan street mapping software. The phone will ship with a spare battery and an in-car holder for using your nuvifone like a traditional personal navigation device. Garmin-ASUS is now taking preorders for the device, and the price is set at NT$13,900 ($435).