GadgetCrowd

Enter… the Nuviphone in two delicious flavors… WinMo and Linux. Follow the link to Garmin in this story from Location, Location, Location: Is it a phone? Is it a GPS way finder? No Its a Phinder!

What the hell is a Phinder you may ask… I dunno I just made it up, but the damn thing looks pretty cool from the pictures and description released today at the Mobile World Congress… which by the way is a hell of a better name for a trade show than CTIA Wireless 2009… those europeans always know how to sound so damn sophsticated!

What does it seem to have going for it? If you’re a phone nerd, well you can go read the hard core specs in all their tri band, VGA, HSDPA, 3 megapixel glory. But if you’re just a regular person then here goes.

First the phone part… it seems to have the basics expected smartphone stuff:
- it a sleek and colorful device both on the outside and in which should give it wide appeal
- good quality camera and wi-fi
- full, soft keyboard (aka the on screen kind, rather than little plastic buttons)
- email (Outlook ActiveSync) and web browsing on a superfast connection
- oh yeah, and I am pretty sure it makes voice calls too!

Then of course the finder stuff, location and finding seems to be baked in across the board as you’d expect (hoped):
- location and navigation tied into basic desktop functions such email, calendar, and contacts as well the ability to easily navigate to addresses from web pages
- the navigation experience seem to mirror what you’d get with a stand alone nuvi GPS sat nav, simple and easy to use
- location aware local business and white pages search
- location aware real time “connected services” including traffic, weather, flight status, events, movie times, etc
- a friend finding service called Ciao! which can tie into both location centric social networks (GyPSii) and more mainstream social networks like Facebook
- automatic geotagging of pictures

The biggest question I have is whether or not they have provided some sort of back up location determining technology to GPS, like Skyhook. I sure hope so. But it wasn’t clear from what I read… I think this could be a critical feature, as there will be a ton of people who want to use this while sitting at the desk, and if location fails at that point the phone fails IMO.

Overall it seems like there is a lot of cool stuff baked into this phone. It’s not that these capabilities don’t exists elsewhere, in fact you can get a lot of this functionality currently on the iPhone. But what could be the deal breaker here is how well location is unified and pulled together in the device. If location just seemlessly works in the background to make your life easier and more convenient, and the applications on the phone work better, then I think they may truly be on to something. Read more…