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A few geoblogs covered the announcement by Garmin, traditionally focusing on GPS devices, of a smartphone named Nuviphone [multiple screenshots], due later in 2008. From the Wikipedia stub: "The Garmin nüvifone is an Internet-enabled mobile phone and personal navigation device manufactured by Garmin. It makes use of a touchscreen with virtual keyboards and buttons, similar to Apple's iPhone." It has GPS capabilities, from the PR: "“This is the breakthrough product that cell phone and GPS users around the world have been longing for — a single device that does it all.” The nüvifone is an innovative mobile phone that has a wide range of advanced yet easy-to-use features. The all touchscreen device is the first of its kind to integrate premium 3.5G mobile phone capability with an internet browser, data connectivity, personal messaging, and personal navigation functions in one device. When powered on, the 3.5-inch touchscreen display reveals three primary icons — “Call,” “Search,” and “View Map” which allow the user to effortlessly master the nüvifone’s functions." Some related stories below.

Anonymous Voxel writes "Geopedia is an application for iPhone which shows Wikipedia articles with locations near you. Geographical coordinate support in Wikipedia is still being developed but enough people have been adding location data that there are thousands of points defined."

The Google Earth blog has a video demonstrating a Virtual Globe (ala Google Earth) all done on the iPhone from the last Where 2.0 conference. From the articles summary : "One of the most interesting exhibits I saw was by a Boulder, Colorado company called earthscape. They showed a number of interesting things (see below), but what really impressed me was when their CEO Tom Churchill pulled out his iPhone to show me how they're working on a 3D Earth application for the iPhone."

Please visit the Google Earth blog to see the video and read the rest of the article.

The All Points Blog has a good roundup of iPhone reviews. Needless to say, it's getting a lot of negative review, but it's still somewhat first generation geotagging for the iPhone. Rather than duplicate the summary here, it's best you head on over there to read it.

MacRumors.com offers a nice summary on the development of turn by turn GPS navigation software for the iPhone. From MR: " MSNBC recently spoke (via MacDailyNews) with several GPS manufacturers about their plans to develop a turn-by-turn GPS solution for the iPhone. While the manufacturers were unable to provide many details about their plans, TomTom reasserted that they do have GPS navigation working on the iPhone and that it works well [...]" See also some selected previous iPhone stories below.

The Google Earth blog brings us news about this. Here is a snippet from their summary : "Last May I published a video demonstration of a cool iPhone application I saw at Where 2.0 which looked like Google Earth. The video demo was such a huge hit, Earthscape - the company who made it - quickly made it into a product you can now buy at the Apple store (available for $10)."

With all the hysteria that came with the Apple's iPhone released, I am quite surprised to see that there is little news on this. Well Engadget has great coverage including videos showing off some of the features of TMobile's android phone release. While both movies contain some Google Maps's usage, the second video is a lot more detailed about this. It shows off something called compass mode, which is sort of like a realtime augmented reality type thing. As you move, the street view moves along with you so that it aligns with the real world (in theory of course). It starts at about 1:30 into the second video, so look at it from there if you want.

All Points Blog is reporting that the first iPhone GPS turn by turn application is available. Here is their summary : "It's from XRoad and covers only a few U.S. cities, but apparently G-Map (unfortunate name, I'll offer) is ok by Apple as it's said to be available via the AppStore. It's a large download (700 Mb free space needed) and apparently downloads all the data so there's no need for a connection to do a search or get directions."

The geoblogs aren't tired of discussing the iPhone and Android. Here's some recent entries. Via APB, MapQuest is now optimized for the iPhone. ABP also share links and information regarding the 300 location-based applications for the iPhone. The same blog mentions Carticipate, an car pool application similar to MapFlow's Avego. The GEB informs us an iPhone GPS app is available for EveryTrail users. And finally, AnyGeo points to the O'Reilly iPhone Live 2008 Conference.

In the Google Android corner, as of today, Android is now (mostly?) fully open source. The official Google Lat Long blog links to an entry on Android mapping. Fuzzy Tolerance discuss SugarTrip, a social traffic mapping app for Google Android. APB informs us Google announced location support via Wi-Fi access points in Google Gears. Also interesting is the VISA commitment to use the Android platform. And finally, a little less location-related, a discussion about barcode reading with Android and why it could become a killer app.
See also numerous related stories below.