Garmin-Asus A10 4GB Phone - Black

Turning on the Nuvifone A10 is a somewhat refreshing experience. You'll be greeted with what looks almost nothing like a typical mobile phone home screen, with two of the three large central icons dedicated to mapping services, as you might expect from a stand-alone GPS unit. Touching "Where to?" or "View Map" takes you to the excellent Garmin mapping software where you can enter an address to be routed to, search for points of interest or just browse the map. The maps, incidentally, are stored on the phone itself, so you needn't worry about not being to download maps in the middle of the outback.

In terms of GPS functionality, the Nuvifone A10 comes with text-to-speech, lane guidance, junction view, and speed and red light camera warnings. Thanks to its internet connectivity, the A10 is linked into MotorMouth's slightly limited live fuel price databased, as well as being wired into Suna's traffic messaging service which, as we've mentioned in previous reviews, is nice to have but deeply flawed. The Garmin maps also incorporate some of Google's mapping fun, displaying Panoramio geotagged photos and Street View for exploring your surrounds.

In terms of guidance, the A10 calculates routes no better than any portable nav device. That is, it will get you from A to B, sometimes the route will be reasonably efficient, most of the time it won't be. Unlike the iPhone 3G/3GS, the A10's GPS tracking was faultless in the suburbs and only suffered the odd drop out in in the CBD; the same standard that most standalone GPS units achieve.

The Nuvifone A10 sports a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen with a HVGA (480x320-pixel) resolution, and while this is a little under-specced compared with many smartphones available today, it is more than adequate for the task of mapping and on par with most 4.3-inch standalone GPS units available today. Garmin's maps are clear and colourful and easy to follow, and the mount's powered speaker did a good job of blasting directions at us while driving.
Newbie phone

It is not so much of a surprise that the Garmin phone is a decent GPS unit, but the big question is whether a mapping company (Garmin) and a PC manufacturer (Asus) can cut it as mobile phone designers. The A10 will be one of only a handful of handsets you'll find in phone stores this year that hasn't been manufactured by one of the half dozen well-known phone companies. So does Garmin-Asus make the grade?

Firstly, full marks go to the dynamic duo for using the Android platform rather than building this phone on a proprietary system. The A10 is powered by version 1.6 of the Android ecosystem, which is a little behind the times, but offers access to the app market and a solid smartphone foundation. The big win here for consumers is Android's multitasking functionality. Even though the user interface is really geared towards mapping, you can easily punch in a location, begin your journey, then dial a phone number and make a call while the maps continue to direct you. One neat treat we love about the A10 is when you pull the handset out of the dashboard mount at the end of a journey the phone will automatically save the car's GPS location in the notifications panel on the home screen.

Unfortunately, these great software decisions are ultimately let-down by less-than-perfect hardware design and some clunky software implementation. The A10 handset is strongly reminiscent of LG's Arena and Renoir handsets in aesthetic, but with all the GPS tech under the hood you won't be surprised to learn that the A10 is thicker and heavier than most phones on the market. Our big problem with the A10, though, is the handset's capacitive touch-keys below the screen dedicated to menu navigation. These keys almost always frustrated us during our review, either acting super-sensitive to touch or not responding to touch at all. There were even instances when we held the phone in landscape mode that the "home" key activated itself and closed the app we were in without us touching it at all.

We experienced this sort of frustration in other parts of the phone as well, with the browser becoming unresponsive during use or extended lag spikes while we navigated the menus. Though the implementation of Android is mostly great, Garmin-Asus has tried to squeeze Android's widget menu in underneath its own thin layer and the results are messy. If you hold the "home" key down, you'll see the task switcher and default Android widgets menu as an overlay. Not only does this feel completely redundant, but it often confuses the system when you press home, bringing up either screen almost at random, and sometimes rendering our review unit unresponsive while it figured out which screen to display.
Overall

Though we struggled a little with the Nuvifone A10, we love what Garmin-Asus has attempted it. If you buy the A10 as a GPS unit that makes phone calls we think you'll be pleasantly surprised with how well both facets of this handset perform. The inclusion of the car-kit accessories in the box makes this proposition even sweeter for road warriors who want a dual-purpose gadget, and the phone's HSDPA web speeds empower the GPS with a range of very useful connected services.

Key Features :

• 3.2inches, HVGA 480x320, TFT with Capacitive touch panel
• Android 2.1 (Éclair)
• 512 MB RAM,512 MB ROM,4 GB eMMc Flash
• Micro-SD card (up to 32 GB)
• Rear 5 Mega-Pixel Auto Focus
• WLAN 802.11 b/g USB 2.0
• Bluetooth V2.0+EDR
• Qualcomm GPSOne-Gen7 (AGPS supported)
• Exchange Support: Calendar, contacts, e-mail
• Google : Android Market, Google Talk, GMail, YouTube, Google Maps
• Navigation: Pedestrian navigation, Automobile navigation
• G-Sensor/E-Compass/Proximity/Light Sensor
• Google Mail/POP3/IMAP4/SMTP
• SMS/MMS/Google Talk
• Google Browser
• MP3/3GP/AAC/AAC+
• Qualcomm 7227 600MHz
• 110 x 58 x 13.9 mm (WxDxH)

Item Includes :

• 1 x Garmin-Asus A10 4GB Phone
• 1 x Mini-USB Wired Headset
• 1 x USB Cable
• 1 x Battery
• 1 x Charger
• 1 x Use Guide

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