Changing Business Model for Garmin
After years of producing the hottest of GPS devices, Garmin has seen the future. Garmin will be releasing their Nuviphone, their first mashup of their GPS technology and cell phones. It is finally ready, after months and months of effort in which they learned putting together a high quality smart phone is harder than it looks. The sad part is that it will not be available until the second quarter of 2009, maybe. While it is great that they are finally releasing the phone (maybe), they are going to miss the ultra important Christmas season. Also, their efforts to get out this phone may be completely wasted since it may not be as good as the iPhone or the G1 Google phone. The question is, does it really make sense to release this phone at all?
As a partial answer to this question, Garmin has said that they will be building an Android phone in the future. Garmin has learned the hard way that they want to be a hardware company. Let Google handle their software.
Of course, the best part for Garmin with going to Android is that they don’t need to try to develop a community of developers. They can just piggyback off the efforts of Google and they focus on their key GPS technology.