How do you demo a smartphone in which its main selling point is its GPS abilities? That was the question I had in mind when I attended the Garmin – Asus M10 launch at Velvet Underground, Zouk KL earlier this evening.

The Garmin – Asus M10 Smartphone is touted to be the world’s first Smart3 phone, an all-in-one package featuring a smart phone, smart navigation features and social media tools. While Windows Phone 7 is just around the corner, the M10 is powered with the latest version of Windows Phone in production, Windows Mobile 6.5.3 Professional.

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Instead of the staid interface normal associated with Windows Mobile 6, the M10 features an interesting UI overlay consisting of two pages (ala iPhone) with shortcut links along with a main screen.

The only problem here is while the UI makes you think it’s a good idea to use your fingers to navigate (there’s a complete lack of visual cues to indicate stylus use), the resistive touch screen will just refuse to co-operate.

The lack of a capacitive touch screen can be due to how Asus prices this phone, but more on that in a bit.

We didn’t get to drive around and put the M10 through its GPS paces but both the press release and the Asus manager present during the launch event mentioned that even in undesirable weather conditions, the M10 has an impressive time to first fix (TTFT) of 33 seconds.

According to Asus, the phone is also on par with a dedicated Personal Navigation Device such as the Garmin 1460 in providing features such as Junction View and Lane Assist.

In my opinion, the main advantage that the M10 in an already saturated smartphone market would be its balance of features and price tag. RM 1499 will get you a decently-powered smartphone with the latest WinMo operating system with a rather pleasing interface, a whole suite of productivity software, social media apps and PND-like navigational features.

That’s pretty much a bargain in my book.

Buyers would probably do themselves a favour by checking out whether the touchscreen works for them and also measure the response time for the GPS in terms of calculating (and recalculating routes).

For more info, do check out www.my.garminasus.com.