Garmin Nuvifone G60 – good for GPS, horrendous as a smartphone
For:
Garmin Nuvifone G60 comes with preloaded North American’s maps with points of internet (POI) database. It is an accurate navigator smartphone that also offers very good call quality.
Against:
The capabilities of the smartphone are limited. The accelerometer does not work occassionally. Garmin still has to work to its user-interface.
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
Garmin Nuvifone G60 is based on WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM technology and supports quad-band of WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900. The operating system is Linux. The Nuvifone G60 has 4GB of user-accessible memory and a micro-SD card slot. The supported wireless interfaces are Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b/g.
3.55-inch LCD display has 480×272 pixels resolution and 16-bit (65000) colors. Garmin Nuvifone G60 has 3-megapixel camera with geo-tagging capability and automatic focus adjustment. The advanced features of the smartphone are HSDPA, HTML Web browser, EDGE, GPRS, mobile mail, 3G data and voice, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS receiver, and support for POP3/IMAP4/SMTP. The supported digital audio format is MP3.
Garmin Nuvifone G60 has two connectors – 1×USB and 1×2.5mm headphones. The G60 has 1100mAH lithium ion battery that has a life of 4 hours of talk time. The accessories supplied inside the package are reference material, USB cable, headphone, AC adapter and car cradle (vehicle mount).
Razzle Dazzle:
Garmin Nuvifone G60 has a clean and plain candy-bar design. It is 4.4 inches tall, 2.3 inches wide and 0.5 inch deep and weighs around 4.8 ounces. The Nuvifone G60 is cloaked in black soft-touch finish. The smartphone has tough and solid construction, but this doesn’t make the handset shock proof.
Inside Dope:
Unlike other GPS-enabled smartphones, Garmin Nuvifone G60 comes preloaded with voice guided-directions and maps, so you do not have to subscribe for a premium location-based service. Garmin has 20 years of experience in the GPS market and it has a great history of manufacturing perfect portable navigation devices (PNDs). However, it still has to work to manufacture a better smartphone. The Nuvifone G60 is based on Linux operating system. It offers features like document viewer, email, calendar, HTML Browser, Wi-Fi, 3G Support, and more. However, the Nuvifone has limitations for each of the feature and still has some problem in its system and user-interface. The Garmin smartphone costs around $299.99 with two-year contract from AT & T. As the Garmin Nuvifone G60 is not a finished product, we would advise the manufacturer to work more in making this a better handset. There are other GPS-enabled smartphones by AT & T in the same price range and we strongly recommend you to skip the G60 phone.
Design
Garmin Nuvifone G60 doesn’t have much physical keys and most of the space is occupied by the touch screen. The power button is located on the top of the Nuvifone G60. A camera activation/capture button and volume rockers sits on the right side. You will find a mini-USB port and micro-SD card slot on the left side. The Nuvifone G60 ships with a car cradle, but not with a car charger.
Display
Garmin Nuvifone G60 has 3.5-inch touch-screen display that has 272×480 pixels resolution and 65,000 colors. The display is bright and clear. You can change the brightness level and select from night and day map colors or auto to allow the automatic adjustment. This feature is similar to other Portable Navigation Devices (PNDs).
There is an inbuilt accelerometer to rotate the display when you tilt the phone. However, this accelerometer does not work smoothly, we faced a lot of lags.
Navigation Array and Keyboard
Home screen of Garmin Nuvifone G60, has shortcuts for View Map, Search and Call on the left side. There is a sliding menu for other applications on the right side including music player, Web browser, email, calendar, contacts, and others. The menu navigation looks easy and straightforward at first sight.
There is no dedicated home key, so you have to press the back button multiple times to come back to home screen. Garmin Nuvifone G60 has a touch-screen QWERTY keyboard in the landscape mode. However, this keyboard changes into ABC format in portrait when you rotate the phone. You cannot change the keyboard format in portrait mode.
GPS and Map Navigation
The Nuvifone G60 has the similar features like it other Garmin’s PNDs. The smartphone comes with preloaded North America’s maps and offers points of interest (POI) database containing lots of entries in different categories such as shopping, food, lodging, entertainment venues and landmarks. AT & T and Garmin also offer additional services like Flight Status for arrival/departure times and gate numbers; Yellowpages.com for business search; and location based social-networking application – Garmin Caio.
You can also get real-time fuel prices, weather information, traffic updates and more, but you will only receive 30 days trial. After that, you have to pay $5.99 per month additionally. Garmin Nuvifone G60 supports multi-destination trips and has inbuilt compass. It offers directions in both pedestrian and automobile model. The pedestrian mode has two routing preferences – off-road and shorter distance. In addition, automobile mode has off-road, shorter distance and faster distances routing preferences. The maps are available in both 3D and 2D view. You can set this smartphone to show in your moving direction. There is plus and minus buttons are used to zoom in and out.
You can view the trip time, direction, speed and more at trip information page. It also saves the trip log so that you can see traveled distance and total time. You will also get text-to-speed feature and voiced guided turn-by-turn directions. The Nuvifone G60 also has “Where am I?” feature to show your location, intersection, nearest address and closest police station, gas stations and hospitals.
Phonebook and PIM features
Garmin Nuvifone G60 has phonebook that can store up to 5000 contacts. Each contact entry can store multiple phone numbers, email addresses, and more. You can divide the callers into group. You can also pair them with a custom ring-tone and a photo for caller id.
The basic features are call forward, call waiting, speakerphone, world roaming capabilities, 3G data and voice, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Bluetooth profiles include support for remote audio control, hands-free kits, wireless and stereo headsets.
Browser
Garmin Nuvifone G60 has inbuilt HTML browser. You can bookmark and email the links, but there is no option to clear the browsing history and to open new browser windows. The browser did not work well also while testing. It had taken 1 minute 50 seconds to load Disney website. The pinwheel progress icon also stopped sometime while loading some websites.
Messaging
The messaging features of Garmin Nuvifone G60 include text messages (SMS), Gmail, AOL, Hotmail and other POP3/IMAP4/SMTP email accounts. However, there is no multimedia messaging and instant messenger clients. The process of the smartphone to configure our Gmail account was quite frustrating as it took a long time to sync with our Gmail inbox. Other smartphone has better options for messaging than the Nuvifone G60.
There is a document viewer to view the attachments, but there is no file manager to open and find the files on the phone memory or at its micro-SD card.
Camera and Music Player
Garmin Nuvifone G60 has a 3.2-megapixel camera with geo-tagging option. However, it does not have features of resolution, white-balance and video recording. The G60 has a basic music player. We captured some images through the camera for testing. The picture quality was good, but still needed some improvement.
Call Quality
We made some calls through quad-band based Garmin Nuvifone G60 using AT & T service. The overall call quality was good. We received loud and clear sound at our end. The callers received sound with some crackling at their end. The speakerphone call quality was also good.
Battery Life
Garmin Nuvifone G60 has lithium ion battery that has a life of 4 hours of talk time and 10 days of idle standby time.
Verdict:
Garmin Nuvifone G60 is an excellent GPS navigator, but still needs improvement to be a good smartphone. The G60 does not worth its cost at all.
