Garmin announced on January 30, 2008, that it will release the "nüvifone" later this year. (http://www.garmin.com/nuvifone/) This is another non-player transforming into a cell phone vendor over an announcement, overnight.
As a first-timer, Garmin had to specify the "phone" product, decide on its design, identify the hardware BOM, and put together the OS and applications. It is all plausible that Garmin recruited some OEM/ODM vendor for collaboration. Even so, this is not a coffee and cake run for a first-timer. The difficulty can be illustrated without going into details. Just look around: It has been more than a year since Apple announced iPhone at MacWorld Expo 2007. How many cell phones on the market today have a similar form factor, a big touch screen, and software integration with comparable user experience? Not many. I can think of LG KU990 Viewty as a close one and Viewty is not available until this fall. It is an eighteen months gap at least for a big cell phone vendor. For a product like this to be released on time in Q3 this year, Garmin may have started the project two years ago. That would be sometime in 2006, before Apple announced iPhone. Either Garmin had planned this long time ago or its product and engineering teams are really efficient, there is something admirable.
You can see Garmin's press release for yourself. It will be at the trade show, 3GSM, in Barcelona next week. It will be the time to know more about the nüvifone, to see whether it is worth all my applause.
