Since Garmin announced at the beginning of November that it is withdrawing from the smartphone market, therefore putting an end to its partnership with Asus, the following announcement might sound surprising.
T-Mobile, the exclusive seller of the Garminfone smartphone, has just released the Android 2.1 software upgrade for the device.
Garminfone is the first Android-based smartphone of the join-venture Garmin-Asus and was launched on the market in June 2010.
The device runs Garmin's own flavor of Android 1.6 platform and comes with a 3.5-inch HVGA capacitive touchscreen with 262K colors and 320x480 pixels resolution.
Other key features of the phone include: 3-megapixel camera with autofocus and geotagging, 4GB internal memory, microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB), Wi-Fi 802.11b/g,
HSDPA 3.6 Mbps and GPS with A-GPS support.
T-Mobile customers that own a Garminfone device can update their smartphones manually, as the carrier didn't push it OTA.
The full set of instructions on how to download and install Android 2.1 for Garminfone can be found on T-Mobile's official forum.
Basically, users will have to download the software update package from a specific location listed on the
forum, on their
desktop PC.
Connect the Garminfone to the computer using the USB cable, then select “File Transfer” mode when the “USB connected” dialog appears.
Once the device is visible on the computer, copy the .update file from the computer to the device. The .update file must be placed in a /Garmin/Update folder. Please note the capitalization as it is important.
After the transfer is complete, simply exit File Transfer Mode and remove the device from your computer in order for the device to successfully be updated.
The device will reboot itself into the update mode and then reboot to the lock screen. As soon as the lock screen is displayed that means that the device has been successfully updated.
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