Design

The design of the G60 hasn’t changed much since its original announcement. It comes in a black soft-touch finish with silver trimmings and has clean front facade with just the screen and nuvifone brand printed under that. The screen measures 3.55 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 480 x 272 pixels. This LCD is unique in that it has a matte finish. Most mobile phone touchscreens are glossy, and while that makes colors stand out more, it can be a nuisance when viewed in direct sunlight due to reflections. Because of the handset’s focus on in-car navigation, the matte surface is ideal. It feels good to the touch, too, not unlike one of those high-quality screen protectors that retail for about S$12.

The dimensions of the G60 are 112 x 58.1 x 14.6mm and it weighs 137g. This isn’t the lightest phone around, but the size and weight are quite similar to other full-touchscreen smartphones like the iPhone and Samsung Omnia.

A power button adorns the top of the device, along with a 2.5mm audio port. We would have preferred a 3.5mm version as that would have been compatible with most standard headphones. To be fair, it’s better than having no audio jack at all. The right side is where volume controls and a camera shortcut are found. All other I/O ports are on the left side including a mini-USB, microSD card slot and a dock connector.

Provided with the G60 is a comprehensive car kit for in-car navigation. Bundled are a dock that attaches to a windscreen and a car charger which draws power from a car cigarette lighter. The suction base and charger worked well in our tests and were easy to install.

On the back, you’ll find the Garmin-Asus logo beside the camera lens. Above this lens is the speaker for speakerphone functions and turn-by-turn instructions.

Features

As a mobile device, the G60 comes with quite a number of wireless features. These include HSPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Like some other smartphones, you can share the nuvifone G60’s HSPA connection with a computer using a USB cable. Unfortunately, this can’t be done wirelessly through Bluetooth.

The interface of this nuvifone is quite unlike most phones. Turning it on, you’ll see three large icons labeled Call, Search and View Map, while other functions appear in a scrollable list with smaller icons. Let’s explore the mobile phone features first. Tapping on Call will bring you to the phone app where you can make calls and access your contacts list. Aside from importing contacts from a SIM card, you can also sync your Outlook data using a bundled Windows app.

Text messages appear in a threaded format so you can track your conversations with contacts easily. There doesn’t appear to be any way to send multimedia messages (MMS) and sending one to the nuvifone doesn’t work either. Setting up email is pretty simple. We tried it out with a Gmail account and all the settings were automatically filled in for us. Attachments such as PDFs, Microsoft Word and Excel documents and images can be viewed, but not edited. Typing on the G60 is achieved through an onscreen keyboard. This worked fine for us in landscape mode, with large keys laid out in QWERTY format that can be tapped on with the thumbs. In portrait mode though, the keys are laid out in alphabetical order in five rows. We don’t know what possessed the company to arrange it this way but we found it impossible to use. There is no option to switch that to QWERTY and we ended up switching to landscape orientation every time text input was needed.

Aside from the strange alphabetical keyboard, there were other aspects of the Linux-based operating system we didn’t like. When connected to a computer as a mass storage device to access its 4GB internal memory, the phone radio would turn off, which mean we couldn’t receive calls.

The G60 also lacks a Home key. This means that if you delve six or seven levels into sub-menus, you will have to press the onscreen Back button six or seven times to get back to the Home screen. Also, when the screen is turned off, unlocking the device requires a double tap. We didn’t mind this most of the time, except when receiving calls–having to tap twice to pick up the phone is very unintuitive. Furthermore, you can’t copy-and-paste text.

You can surf the Internet with the G60 using the Webkit-based browser. There’s no Flash support and compared to other smartphone browsers like Safari on the iPhone and Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile, it felt a little slow in rendering pages. Nonetheless, most pages appeared accurately and it’s a good feature to have.

The navigation aspect of the G60 is where this device shines. Finding an address is idiot-proof. Typing in an address, for example, requires you to first tap in a house/building number, followed by a street name. After that’s done, the software will give you some suggestions, and chances are one of them will match. There’s even a local search feature which connects to a server to find points of interest. We weren’t able to test this out properly because of a “server error” message, but this is supposed to tell you where places such as petrol kiosks and tourist attractions can be found.

Turn-by-turn navigation is available by default and your local maps will be bundled with the G60. According to Asus, buying other countries’ maps can be done through the Garmin-Asus Web site. We couldn’t find any sign of Assisted-GPS on the device, and cannot confirm if this is not available or simply invisible to the user. In our GPS tests, there didn’t appear to be any cellular data transfer activity. We have contacted Asus to clarify and are awaiting a response. Even then, getting a satellite lock didn’t take long most of the time, and we found driving directions to be accurate. The internal digital compass also tells you which direction you are facing, which is useful when orienting yourself with the GPS for walking directions.

Other GPS features include the ability to geotag a picture, sending your location through an email or text message easily and tap on an address found on a Web page to quickly show it on the map.

An Asus spokesperson told us during the CommunicAsia tradeshow in Singapore last month that the G60 will be the first and last device making use of its proprietary Linux platform. That’s not bad news altogether as Windows Mobile and Android (to be used by Garmin-Asus in future devices) are much better smartphone platforms with decent third-party developer support. On the other hand, these established smartphone operating systems can learn a thing or two from some of the navigation-friendly features found on the G60 implemented.

The 3-megapixel camera found on the G60 is responsive, our only gripes being the lack of an LED for dark situations and a very stiff shutter button on the right. Images are decent as long as you keep your expectations in check.

Performance

Calls quality is good on the G60, and the speakerphone worked well, perfect for handsfree use in cars. Battery life is rated at 4 hours of talktime, and we got about two days of use with some GPS navigation before the 1,100mAh battery went flat.

The G60 doesn’t multitask and its 128MB of RAM seemed sufficient to keep it chugging along. There’s no other phone running the same OS, so we can’t compare it to anything. But in general, the system was responsive, slowing down only in certain areas like the Web browser when a very large page started loading.

Conclusion

The Garmin name is synonymous with navigation devices and the G60 does not disappoint in that area. While it’s sad that this phone will be the last of its kind (software-wise), we see some strengths that Garmin-Asus could certainly use in its future products. If GPS is the main consideration for your next mobile phone purchase, the nuvifone G60 is definitely worth considering. We are still awaiting pricing and specific availability details and will update this review when Asus responds.

[Review by John Chan]