Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I have a little egg on my face, I’m afraid.  Digging through the mountain of press kits that were thrust at me at Mobile World Congress this morning, I found the Garmin kit.  As you may recall, based on the conversation I had with Garmin reps at the show, I was pretty dismissive of nüvifone.  The booth reps positioned it as a navigation device with telephony, and downplayed media altogether.  Having just seen the Nokia line of GPS enabled phones, I found Garmin’s story pretty uninteresting. 

However, the following videos were part of their press kit.  They tell a different story.

Having seen these, it’s clear that what Garmin is building is an all singing, all dancing phone with navigation. It looks like iPhone + GPS and perhaps a little more. It’s just their branding that is so horrible, with its strong emphasis on navigation.  It’s no wonder that representatives on their booth were so confusing. 

My apologies for not having taken the time to dig deeper into this device when I first wrote about it.  And perhaps Garmin marketing can take a lesson from this experience and tune up their messaging.  Hint: start by dropping the goofy dialepsis diaeresis on the u in nüvifone.  Anything that hard to type isn’t going to get written correctly anyway.