Garmin and Asus bet on a different kind of cell phone

February 9, 1:17 PMGadgets ExaminerDan Appleman

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Is it a GPS or a phone or a perfect melding of both

The market is being flooded by a variety of Smartphones, many of them trying to catch up to the iPhone. Garmin’s Nuvifone, announced over a year ago, seems to be taking a unique approach – but will it work?

The BlackBerry, G-Phone and new Palm pre are all follow a strategy similar to Apple – create a great Smartphone experience (the details of that experience vary), built on a phone operating system of choice (Android for the G-Phone, webOS for Palm, Blackberry OS for Blackberry). Each of them allows third party developers to create applications for the phone. All of them are far behind Apple in terms of providing a platform for outside developers.

Providing a platform – that is critical. The iPhone is actually not a cell phone – it is a cell phone shaped computer platform for a variety of applications that just happens to also be a phone. In a platform war the victory usually goes to the platform that offers the most applications – because those applications help sell the phone. Apple knows this, and it’s the reason why most of the advertisements you see today for the iPhone focus on the appStore rather than features of the phone itself. Apple is trying to position the iPhone as the “desktop” for portable devices. And they are succeeding.

Garmin recently teamed up with Asus to provide the Nuvifone series. In doing so, they are taking a radically different approach to the other smartphone vendors. Rather than try to create a new platform, they are instead specifically targeting the merger of location and phone based services. The argument seems to be that everyone has a cell phone, and everyone has (or soon will have) a GPS, so a device that perfectly merges the two will be popular as it will eliminate the need for people to buy and carry two devices.

This is not a foolish argument. GPS adoption is increasing rapidly, but is still years behind cell phone adoption. Today’s cell phones do have GPS functionality, but it is a standalone application, one that often incurs extra charges. The idea of a device that is as much GPS as phone does make sense and could find a substantial market. One telling difference between the Nuvifone and other smart phones – though the first in the series runs Linux, company representatives have not chosen the operating system for later models, suggesting they might use Android and that the OS is not important. In other words – they are looking to sell a solution, not a platform.

Can this approach work? Time will tell.