Garmin's Nuvifone Delayed Again

According to the latest news on the Web, Garmin will set back its nuvifone GPS/smartphones once again, this time pointing towards a release in the second half of the year, at least this is what the company's president and COO Cliff Pemble seems to have said during a recent conference call with analysts.

“Smartphones are complicated and bringing one to market that’s built totally from the ground up on a custom Linux platform is not an easy task,” is what Pemble stated, while also adding that the company was in the testing phase of the certification process, and that the carriers it had talked to for the launch of its handsets were interested in the products.

As many of you might already know, Garmin was expected to launch a nuvifone back in the third quarter of last year, while this year it announced a consumer-aimed Linux-based G60 nuvifone, expected to launch in the first quarter, a handset coming from the company's partnership with Asus. For the second half of the year, the Garmin-Asus joint-venture would have launched M20, a mobile phone running Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional.

In addition, to announcing the delay of its smartphones, Garmin also mentioned at the conference call that it could not tell at the moment whether it would focus more on the development of smartphones or on that of personal navigation devices (PNDs), and that it all depended on three factors in the automobile/mobile sector, such as smartphones, PNDs and OEM sales.

Hopefully, the Nuviphone G60 won't get delayed once again, and we'll be able to see the phone on the market in the third quarter of the year, though 12 months later than originally stated back in January 2008. Otherwise, people might lose their confidence that the company will indeed release the mobile phone.