Did Garmin Just Make the Smartest Android Phone on the Market?
GPS-system maker 
Garmin (GRMN) has just announced its long-delayed Garminfone, an Android device that doubles as an in-car GPS device. And it might be the best Android device on the market, simply because it's the only one without an apparent identity crisis.
As I argued recently, the multiplicity of Google (GOOG) Android phones that have flooded the market this year may be selling well, but they also suffer from brand confusion and misguided marketing. So much so that a Verizon (VZ) iPhone, if it were made reality, could utterly deflate demand for Android phones.
The iPod and iPhone have achieved what Kleenex has for tissues: the device (app phone) and the brand-name (iPhone) have become fungible. Android device-makers have a lot of work to do if they're going to set themselves apart. Android's biggest press junket thus far has been the Verizon Droid campaign, which looks so geeky and masculine that it could be mistaken for the home screen of a first-person shooter game on X-Box. In fact, check out Verizon's Droid landing page (below) and the aesthetic of the game Crysis (further below) and you'll see what I mean.
Unsurprisingly, AdMob statistics show that while Apple (AAPL) and Palm (PALM) were courting both genders equally, Android has been busy building up a 73% male user base. The problem is that the Droid could do just fine for female users -- just like any Android phone. But you'd never know it from watching the commercials, which only appeal to the male half of the smartphone market.
In fact, the Garminfone is not so much phone as much as a GPS device that tries to remove redundancy in its users' lives (since presumably no one needs a standalone GPS and a smartphone with GPS). It's worth remembering that this was the iPhone's original value proposition: it did the exact same thing by combining a music player and phone. (The Droid Incredible, with its 8MP camera, could style itself as a photo-enthusiast phone, but it's too busy looking macho.)Garmin's lifestyle-integration is deep, too -- not just about designing a flashy home screen (ahem, HTC). One example: the Garminfone automatically saves your parking spot when you reach a destination, and helps you navigate back.
This is a worthy way forward for Motorola (MOT), HTC and Samsung, which are struggling to figure out a reason that people should buy their phones -- besides the reality that they're locked into a contract that isn't with AT&T (ATT). Motorola's tepidly-received "Motoblur" skin tries awfully hard by using social networking as a vector; it puts a bunch of social Web widgets right up front. But it also comes with lots of AT&T bloatware and too little processing power to run all those widgets at once, which users complain makes the the phone slow and hard to customize. Social networking is an awfully big tent, so Motorola narrowed their target customer by narrowing the abilities of the phone -- so much, in fact, that it won't let users upgrade to the newest version of Android. Garmin, by contrast, has made their customizations additive, not restrictive.
The Garminfone may not be a big commercial success, coming as late in the game as it has, but that's not really the point. In a market where the benchmark company, Apple, has claimed customization and multi-use as its flagship message -- "there's an app for that" -- it's time Android phones sold users on a lifestyle and not mere hype.