If what Garmin Asus G60 did was to bring great navigation into a smartphone, then what the Garmin Asus A10 does is to make this offering even better. A refurbished G60, is what we call this one, with better and more amazing features and all that was previously missed out.
The Garmin Asus partnership brings in devices for navigation. The A10 is one that impressed us starting from the word go. Well, not completely, as it takes ages to start up. But, once switched on, the 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen is superb with its pinch and zoom and brilliant touch response is better than the G60's resistive screen.
The eight home screens or panes provide a lot of real estate space for a great variety of shortcuts and widgets.
Being a navigation phone, the first screen is by default set for navigation. While on the other screens the bottom options have a shortcut to the navigation screen. And while on the navigation screen the same option moves to the other screens, the bottom of the screen has the call, menu upward scroll and the navigation/right buttons. The menu scroll opens up the entire menu screen for all the applications it has on offer.
The phone looks and feels great. Though slightly heavy, the black matt body is quite well built. The top has the earphone and three buttons at the bottom of the screen are feather touch buttons and are the back/exit/cancel, the home and the options button. The home button acts as a shortcut to any of the panes that you would want to go to. The options button gives you the various things to do with the menu. The back features the 5 mega pixel camera and the speaker grill. The right of the device has the micro USB slot, the navigation cradle connector and the right has right has the volume rocker. The top features the power/lock button and the 3.5 mm audio jack. The layout is quite minimal which is great.
The overall user interface is quite amazing with smooth movement from one pane to the other. The ease of putting in and removing shortcuts, widgets and folders is great. Then wallpapers, notifications and settings can be modified directly. The menu has all the applications in place and the Android market gives even more to play around with, so you can have one pane each filled with applications on social media comics, entertainment, games and many others from the millions of applications on offer. Syncing your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter accounts is a breeze even while using GPRS. Wi-Fi just makes things better. Contacts get synced with the social networking sites comfortably.
What is also impressive is the YouTube streaming on the device with its super loud sound. To talk of which, the device features amazing sound quality and while the video played, it was audible even outside the room.
However, the missing FM radio did sadden me a bit. But with a built-in storage of 4 GB, the device allows storage of numerable songs and videos and this is further more expandable via microSD card. The provided earphones are quite comfortable, also, the 3.5 mm audio jack do make experimentation easy. The phone has a very smooth messaging feature with a threaded appearance. Typing a message out on both the landscape and portrait mode are manageable but only after some getting used to.
The navigation feature in the A10, which is, a navigation phone, is quite good. Here's where the Garmin maps and the Google Maps come into play (both have different maps and navigation). The navigation screen gives you a shortcut to choose the location where you want to go. And once chosen, you decide whether you walk or drive to the location.
The drive directions are quite accurate. In case you do decide to take a different route, as happened in my case, the Garmin navigation recalculates and gives you the next best directions. I got the route from CP to my house more or less accurately. Similar was the case from home to office the next day. The navigation gives you turn by turn voice instructions to your destination. And if you aren't happy with the pre recorded voice on the device, you can take some time and record your own or the voice of your choice with Garmin Voice Studio, to direct you.
The pedestrian navigation works fine as well. There is a feature to locate the nearest locations like the nearest point of interest, home (set an address), recently found, an address, cities, coordinates, intersections or any particular address you'd want to. The 'where am I?' and 'Where to?' appslications tell you your current location and the route to your destination. Along with the Garmin maps are the Google Maps for navigation as well (which, is not currently available in India). However, the geotagging works quite fine. With that you can gladly tag yourselves around. Add on other geotagging applications like Foursquare from the huge app. Store and there is a Garmin tagging app., Ciao! for tagging.
All the bunch of built-in apps. like checking the weather status, flight status that give you the weather information of any possible city or the flight status of any flight that you need from any airport you desire. The specific Twitter and Facebook apps for Android devices is amazing. The Facebook app allows you to update a picture directly after you click it. The uploads were super fast (again, on GPRS connectivity) at a resolution of 480x640.
That brings us to the camera specifications. The images taken normally are quite clear, mostly in daylight and at during the dark one does miss the flash, which should have been there. The shots can be edited with the light adjustments and colour effects. The 5 mega pixel camera features auto focus, that worked quite fast and well. Except for the shots taken during evening and at night, that turn out to be quite grainy. The videos are recorded in MP 4 or 3 GPP formats and sadly, can be taken at a maximum resolution of a pathetic 320x240 and goes as low as 176x144!
Finally the battery life is quite good with a full day usage of very many applications, GPS and constant surfing. On an average usage of a bit of talking, navigation and a bit of internet usage, the A10 stays on charge for a day upto a day and a half.
The A10 is a definite improvement over the previous G60 and adds on a chunk of more features. It is one of the best navigation phones that I have come across in the recent times. Of course with slight flaws here and there, that are quite acceptable. But hey, have we come across the most perfect device yet? I think not.
So, at a price tag of 19k, the device with the 2.1 OS (which is upgradable to 2.2), the Garmin Asus offering is a good, infact a great Android navigation phone.
