Garmin Neverfone Nuvifone G60 Ships Next Week To Someone

Garmin, which has been fairly frank about how totally, like, hard it is to make a new smartphone, has finally announced they’ll be shipping the Nuvifone S60 to Taiwan on the 27th. It only took the—wait, 19 months?

It was January of 2008 when we first caught wind of Garmin’s widening ambitions, and grabbed our first joyful glimpse of the navigation-centric handset, followed by an (also joyful!) hands-on. But that was in February, nearly a year after the announcement. And also, again, that was February, about six months ago. The ASUS-built Nuvifone was uniformly impressive from the start—with a custom-built Linux OS, creative location-aware applications, clean styling—but it’ll have a much tougher go of it in the age of app stores, especially against the 3GS, Pre, and Hero, which have pretty impressive GPS integration in their own right.

Sadly all we’re learning today is that the G60—to be followed closely by the much less exciting Windows Mobile M20—is shipping somewhere—US release, decidedly not happening in Q3 of last year, is still unknown, as is the price. [Garmin]