GPS + smartphone = grrrrrr!

Published online on Wednesday, Oct. 07, 2009

This week, after many delays, Garmin and AT&T have unveiled a new candidate for the Gadget Combo Hall of Fame: GPS + cell phone.

It's called the Garmin Nuvifone G60, and it costs $300 (after a $100 rebate and a two-year AT&T contract). And except for one small niggling detail, it's a surprisingly successful mating.

First of all, it's a fantastic auto or pedestrian GPS unit. The suction-cup windshield mount is brilliantly designed. Garmin has endowed this thing with its top-of-the-line navigation goodies. For example, it speaks street and place names. Better yet, the speech doesn't sound as though it's stitched together from canned chunks, like most talking gadgets.

The Nuvifone includes a national White Pages and Yellow Pages. A gas-station app shows current gas prices at stations near you. A movies app instantly shows you what movies are playing nearby, complete with today's show times.

Sadly, all of these real-time information services (traffic, gas, movies, weather, White Pages, Local Events) cost $6 a month forever.

And your happiness with this gadget begins crashing the moment you snap it off that ingenious windshield mount.

Whatever technology Garmin chose for the Nuvifone's touch screen was a balky mistake. You have to really bear down to make it register a click, and "flicking" to scroll a list works only sometimes. The rest of the time, it registers a click on whatever item was beneath your finger at the start of the flick. It's wildly frustrating.

The Nuvifone has Wi-Fi built in. But the Web browser gives "crude" a whole new meaning. There are + and - buttons to zoom into or out of a Web page, but you can't control what it's zooming into.

There's a long list of other frustrations, all of which scream, "Garmin's a GPS company, not a smartphone designer!"