Loading ...Garmin Nuvifone G60 Review
Garmin Review – Navigation Good, Smartphone Bad.
Garmin introduced the G60 cell phone at the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Spain and it is now just arriving in North America. It has been a difficult and long road to market. For Garmin’s first attempt at a smartphone, the G60 seems like a product that is half complete. The design is a simple box like shape with a special soft coating that makes the phone feel very secure in your hand. It has a 3.55″ resistive touch screen with a 272 x 480 pixel resolution. The screen isn’t the sharpest picture, but it is clear. Blue-tooth, Wi-Fi and 3G are standard. The G60 comes with an accelerometer that doesn’t work well at all. Turning the phone from landscape to portrait sometimes makes the accelerometer stop working all together. There are no other physical navigational buttons on the phone, having to use the home button on the screen everytime you want to go back becomes very annoying.
This device looks more like a hand held GPS unit that this company is known for. As for the operating system, there are many flaws. For starters the QWERTY keyboard is only available in landscape mode, when the phone is turned to portrait it goes into ABC format, why the inconsistency? Secondly the phone can be synced to Outlook but it has to be tethered to your computer. Thirdly, the phone comes with a web browser that is almost impossible to use, it is slow, it doesn’t allow you to open multiple pages and you can not even clear your previous browser history.
The one good thing about this cell phone is the navigation, after all its what Garmin does. All in all the G60 is a poor Smartphone with good navigation, it isn’t worth the money.
