Garmin nuvifone G60
Comments (0) Garmin Nuvifone G60 GPS Phone Review: Do Not Buy
Here the new review from Gizmodo
Garmin nuvifone G60
What’s Bad ?
• The resistive touchscreen reminds me of phones circa 2006, bad for everything but big-button tapping.
• There’s no homescreen button, to quickly take you out of a mire of menus.
• It’s crashy—screens froze twice while I was writing this, forcing a full-on hard restart.
• Sometimes the accelerometer just stops working completely.
• The camera is terrible—if the hardware button required for the shutter even works—and there’s no video of any kind.
• The web browser is all but useless, because it relies heavily on zooming in and out, and the touchscreen easily confuses swiping and tapping.
• The interface looks cool at first, but there are strange design choices throughout. Want an example? The QWERTY keyboard only appears in horizontal mode—it’s ABCDE in vertical mode. Also, no “Where To?” button, a la older Nuvi devices.
• You have to pay a $5/month premium charge to check the weather, traffic, local events and other services—all of which can be found on free apps from real smartphone platforms (not just iPhone).
• Even when using email (let alone calendar), there doesn’t seem to be any awareness of the rest of the internet: The email wizard lets you enter any address and password, but it doesn’t say whether it can actually get mail. This tenacious little phone is still trying to log onto my Hotmail account.
• The battery ran down completely during my first day of testing, after a few phone calls and some modest GPS navigation, and the battery indicator drops fast when it’s just on standby. In fairness, you shouldn’t use this phone or any other phone without a car charger, if you intend to use it for GPS navigation.
• There is no car charger. It’s missing the $7 USB-to-cig-lighter adapter. AT&T probably wanted to sell it separately, but when I asked at my local AT&T store, they didn’t even carry it.
• Since it’s an AT&T phone, it has to compete with the iPhone and other handsets that are way better. If the Nuvifone were on Verizon, it would at least have a network advantage in certain markets that it could lord over the iPhone herd. But even Apple haters would have a hard time spending an extra $100 on this—with the exact same phone reception.
