Well folks, believe it or not, but the wait for the Garmin nuvifone G60 is almost over.  On October 4th AT&T Wireless well begin selling the handset for $299 after a 2-year contract signing and $100 mail-in-rebate.  Garmin-Asus’ G60 is said to provide the “easiest-to-use location experiences available because it is the only phone to fully integrate the world’s best selling GPS navigator with voice, data and mobile web.”  So it’s probably best to think about the G60 as a GPS with an integrated phone, and not the other way around.

The G60 will include a 3 megapixel camera with geo tagging, be preloaded with a ton of POIs, have access to AT&T’s 20,000 WiFi hotspots and come packed with a dashboard and windshield mount.  When the G60 is removed from the in car mounts it will automatically mark your position just in case you can’t find your way back to your car in the crowded mall parking lot.

So the question on everyone’s mind is can the G60 compete with the iPhone?  Fortunately, and unlike many other smartphone’s out there, it sounds like the G60 will be a fully functional GPS, which is something Apple’s handset is most certainly not, unless of course you purchase some aftermarket accessories, which even then could be a stretch.  300 bones is quite a lot to spend on a phone, but if you consider the cost of a GPS and a phone combined, then you might look at this as a steal.  Just keep in mind that the battery life will most certainly be a concern since GPS tends to be a hog in this department.

Garmin-Asus confirmed a July 27 shipping date for their long awaited Nuvifone G60. It will initially go on sale in select Asian markets and will come to the States during the second half of 2009. The Nuvifone G60, a phone with GPS-centric functions, features 3.5 inch display, quad-band, WiFi, accelerometer, pre-loaded maps of North America or Eastern/Western Europe, and more.

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Word is that Malaysia will be the first to receive the Garmin-Asus phones, the nuvifone G60 and M20, sometime in the next 30 days.  This doesn’t exactly line up with the rumored June launch we heard about in April, but at this point we’ll take what we can get.  When the Linux and Windows powered phones will becoming over seas to the US and UK is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for sure: no one really cares.

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Garmin-Asus announced a joint collaboration on an Android phone, to be released in Q1 of 2010. It seems like everyone and their cupcake baking mothers are developing some kind of Android phone. Let’s hope the experience of this duo can produce an intuitive, well designed phone with (one can only assume) solid GPS features.

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Garmin-Asus announced their official partnership a few months back and with it we expected the long rumored, then officially announced Garmin phone to launch in a timely fashion.  I guess our hopes were set a little too high, because word on the street is that we won’t see the first handset from the navigation company until June of this year, at least that’s what an inside source says.  Carrier and price you ask?  Keep dreaming, but if one of their phones - probably the G60 as alluded to by the source - is set to launch in June you can probably expect an announcement in May, which is around the same time Windows Mobile 6.5 launches (which might mean the M20 instead).

[via BGR]

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