ASUS

It takes a little bit of creative dot-connecting to follow our thought process in this place — but we think we’re onto something, so do us a favor and lend us an ear for a second. Garmin-Asus, of course, kicked off its North American efforts with the forgettable nuvifone G60 on AT&T, then just followed it up with the Garminfone on T-Mobile. We’d speculated previously that AT&T might have some sort of US exclusive on the use of the “nuvifone” name, considering that the company strays from that branding in no other market in the world. Additionally, all of ASUS’ phones are happening through the Garmin-Asus joint venture right at this time, so when we found this E600 “PDA Phone” in the FCC this week, we knew right away that we were likely looking at a new nuvifone model. Looking at the filings, we see that it’s rocking 850 / 1900MHz 3G, which leads us to believe that AT&T might be ready for round two — either that, or one of our GSM friends north of the border is looking to deploy it — but any way you slice it, that G60 is looking pretty long in the tooth.

Garmin-Asus planning another nuvifone for AT&T? originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Intel P55 Express chipset snafu that caused iPhones to lose their syncing minds has at this time been remedied — at least by one motherboard maker. Gigabyte has issued a BIOS update making things all hunky-dory between the phone and the mobo, putting your troubles to an end. The P55 is Intel’s latest midrange chipset and orchestrates things for newer Core i5 / i7 machines. The other two P55 purveyors, ASUS and MSI, were also caught by the bug, and there are anecdotal reports of success with an ASUS BIOS update, but not official fixes as of yet. Given the competitive nature of this market, though, we’d be surprised if those two companies didn’t quickly follow suit. All’s well that ends well, right?

Had the device you’re peering at above come out just a few months later, it would’ve taken two full years to go from introduction to on sale. Thankfully, the good folks over at Garmin and ASUS (and Garmin-Asus, as it were) were able to get the nüvifone G60 out to AT&T before the holiday shopping season of 2009, but were they still too late? There’s no doubt that this very smartphone had a lot of folks drooling in early 2007, but to say a lot has happened in the mobile realm between then and at this time would be Makethe truth a grave injustice. The iPhone 3G has fallen to $99, a slue of Android handsets have hit the market and dedicated PND (portable navigation devices) have found their persons in the bargain bin. Oh, and some pretty fantastic GPS software has managed to land within Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. In other words, competition couldn’t possibly be hotter, and considering that the specifications haven’t been updated on this $299 device since it was originally declare, you’re probably wondering if it even deserves a chance. Read on to find out the answer.

Continue reading Garmin-Asus nuvifone G60 review