Asus Garmin M10 Rohan Naravane, Jun 03, 2010 1800 hrs IST

This Windows Mobile 6.5 based "Pro-navigation" phone is dead on arrival

 

 

Sturdy build, decent day snaps from camera, built-in GPS navigation software

Resistive screen doesn't accurately register to touch, almost outdated Windows Mobile 6.5 OS, no car kit in the package, no ambient light sensor, no value for money 

Late last year, we had tested the Asus Garmin G60, a child that was born from the relationship between the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer and the American GPS maker. We liked the concept and Garmin's Linux-based OS offered good usability. But it ended there, as the phone disappointed on many fronts, which didn't justify its high Rs. 30,000 selling price back then.

Today, we have the Asus Garmin M10 to test. The M10 moves away from Garmin's in-house interface and rather runs Windows Mobile 6.5, a soon-to-be phased out operating system, judging by the fact that Windows Mobile 7 is just months away from release. So is this phone any better than the G60? Or is it more of a DOA (Dead on Arrival) product?

 Design and Build

The Asus Garmin M10 is a well-built phone. The construction, typical to all Asus phones, is firm and solid. The 'nuvifone' metal plate at the bottom of its face gives it a unique identity. The phone is fairly convenient to hold and isn't too heavy for the front pocket either. However, the glossy body easily attracts fingerprints. The 3.5-inch touchscreen is adequately sized and sports a relatively high 800 x 480 pixel resolution, which gives off a crispy output.

The brightness is adequate, but unfortunately has to be manually controlled. After seeing an ambient light sensor in many sub-Rs.20k touchphones, to find it missing in the M10 is disappointing. This especially holds true when one has to manually bump up the brightness when using the phone under bright sunlight; it is barely visible otherwise. 

The screen is of resistive nature. The G60 also had a resistive type, but the screen was covered with a matte finish, while this phone has a glossy covering. The matte finish is smoother to the fingers, as compared to the glossy one. That along with a finger optimized UI on the G60 had made it an easy to operate phone.

Whereas, the M10's unsmooth screen surface paired with Windows Mobile 6.5, which to an extent is still a Stylus-era OS, works majorly against it. Finger input isn't accurately registered throughout the UI when compared to capacitive screened touchphones of today. It just feels like a phone from a few generations before. There are only three buttons on the front face - a call answer/end pair and a Windows home button. These touch sensitive buttons fail to respond to your touch from time to time. There's an accelerometer, but it sometimes switched screen orientation incorrectly, causing more frustration. 

To the left we have a microUSB port and a car kit attachment port. On top we have a power button and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. To the left are the volume buttons and a stylus (yuck!) towards the end. There is no camera shutter button; you have to rely on clicking the virtual button on the screen to take a snap, much like the iPhone. The camera sensor and a speaker grille sits at the back. 

The Asus Garmin G60 came with a car kit. Since they are promoting these phones as "pro-navigation", the missing car kit accessory in the M10 was disappointing. 

User Interface

You may have got a hint of our disappointing tones about Windows Mobile 6.5 on this phone. First of all, this ill-fated OS will soon be replaced with Microsoft's swanking new "Windows Mobile 7" OS by the end of this year. So, if your focus is to install a lot of apps and exploit your phone's potential to the fullest, then you should really reconsider even reading this review further. WinMo was primarily designed to be operated with a stylus. But then the iPhone came and people wanted to avoid styluses like the plague. This in turn forced manufacturers to come up with touch friendly versions of their phones, Windows Mobile included.

HTC tried their best to make it fairly usable with the 'Sense UI', but the ugliness of WinMo 6 was seen beneath the UI layer from time to time. Microsoft too tried to make their default UI more 'finger usable' with the 6.5 update, but are still far behind from the UI on the iPhone or Android phones that were built for fingers.

We got irritated with the usability of the UI right from the beginning. Starting from the power button, which wouldn't function a lot of times, causing us to frantically press it over and over again till we got a response. The homescreen consists of two screens full of commonly used application icons. At the bottom we have the dialer shortcut and the GPS centric 'Search' and 'View Map' shortcuts. The honeycomb menu structure is interestingly designed. However, Internet explorer is still behind browsers like the Safari on the iPhone or the default browser on Android 2.1 in terms of page rendering and web browsing. Windows Media player took ages to read music off the 8GB memory card we inserted. One of the few interesting tricks I saw in WinMo 6.5 is the built-in Internet Sharing capability that lets Wi-Fi enabled devices use your mobile internet connection.

The dialer supports smart dialing, which is nice. Typing messages on the QWERTY board in portrait mode was a hit-and-miss affair; more misses than hits we'd say. If you deploy meticulous precision, then probably you'd be able to type at a decent pace. The landscape QWERTY part is tilted to the left, thus hampering usability.

The navigation software on the M10 is exactly the same as it was on the G60. You can read about our detailed opinion on it here. To quickly sum it up, the level of details of the maps is just average as compared to Google Maps. In our use in Mumbai city, we weren't able to get results for our destination fifty percent of the time. But when you get the result, the navigation is mostly accurate. Thankfully, unlike the Asus Garmin G60, where you couldn't install any third party apps, thanks to M10's WinMo OS, you can install and keep Google Maps handy. Of the pre-installed ones, we really like the 'Flight Status' app that lets you know of flight arrival/departure details in an easy to use interface. 

The worst part about the User Interface has to be the average touch sensitivity throughout the UI. After knowing how smooth capacitive touch phones can be, using the M10 was a put off. You'd might just get used to it, but then you'd miss out on the great usability that many of the phones in the M10's price range offer.  

Performance

The call quality of this phone is average. While the output of the caller's voice from the earpiece was loud, it wasn't very clear. It sounded muffled and was hard to understand. The loudspeaker is fairly loud though. The on-board 5 megapixel camera took good quality snaps in daylight, but can't do the same in low light due to the absence of a photo assist light. The audio quality via the provided earphones was poor. Even after plugging in our Creative EP-630s, we didn't get as good an output as we did when connecting them to other phones. The battery life of this phone is again, just about average. It lasted less than a day with moderate usage.

Price and Verdict
The Asus Garmin M10 is priced at Rs. 19,990. This phone is definitely priced better than the Rs. 30,000 Asus Garmin G60. But it's still 20 grand - not a small amount by any chance. And when you're putting all that hard earned money into a product, you'd expect at least a decent, usable phone.

But you don't get that with the M10. It's inaccurate touch input gave us negative vibes while using the phone. We could compare this phone with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. At Rs. 13,000, Nokia 5800 also offers you almost every feature the M10 does, including turn by turn navigation. In that sense, the M10 feels overpriced and not worth it. We wouldn't recommend it to anybody.