Garmin smartphone partnership to unveil more products

Will these be GSM only or have CDMA abilities? Holding out for LTE?

It seems it will be very Hard for them to compete with the droid Based Phones..My Droid has Google maps..That Update Free every month. And the Gps is fast..and so easy to use. Why you would need any better Gps than the Droid based Phones is beyond me. What Garmin Needs is a way to just keep Updating there Software...Maybe wireless...Just take it in the House..and it updates..Like the Wii..and PS3..and Droids

The problem with them now is they need their network connection to update map data as you go - if you have no signal for the phone & data, you got no navigation either.

I don't see that as a problem. There is no reason that a GPS based phone can't update its maps and store them in local memory. My nuvi has 2 gig of memory, and a lot of empty space for POI files, multitudes of speech files, plenty of alternate vehicles and so on. One or two gig for off-line map storage isn't much for a smart phone to dedicate now. Even the Android Nexus-One has more than that, and the iPhone has 16 gig if I understand the specs correctly. A smart phone could update itself when a connection is available, or even over wifi, on a regular basis and be much more current than a nuvi that has to be manually updated (no more often than quarterly, and even then you have to pay for the updates while Google is giving them away free).

Sure, you lack things like the satellite view option (unless you had the foresight to download those for a certain area), but since those are not available at all for a nuvi I hardly see that as a downside for the android based smart phones.

Both the Navigon and Tom Tom apps for the iPhone store the maps on the phone. While Android may catch up someday right now Apple owns the market so much so they sold twice as many iPhones last quarter as they did the previous one.

The problem is - they don't cache the maps; they could - but they present driods don't. They depend on the cellular data network to function. And if that's not there, you got no navigation. And that can be problematic.

It's more than problematic - it's horribly short-sighted and will be a deal-breaker for anyone who has used a 'real' GPS.

You can turn debug mode on and use a file management app like Astro to see how the Droid/Google Navigation precaches the maps with a set destination and pulls the maps dynamically when aimlessly driving (no set destination). Yes, the problem is that regardless, you currently need a signal to pull the maps at some point. So if you have no 3G signal at the starting point, you're out of luck.

Considering that the MotoDroid comes standard with 16GB card, it won't be long before someone @ Google implements complete static caching of the full mapset along with user preferences.

The Google map caches on a MotoDroid are located @

/sdcard/google_maps_navigation/cache/tilecache_ImageTileStore.db

/sdcard/google_maps_navigation/cache/tilecache_VectorTileStore.db

The precached audible directions to destination are also located in this directory as .wav files.

I think it will be hard to compete with droid and iPhone as well. It will be a tough sell.

Just more data plan BS!