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Garmin has a new device up its sleeve, nuvifone, that combines the features of its nuvi line of GPS navigators with that of a multimedia cell phone.

This isn’t the first time Garmin's built something outside its traditional product portfolio of standalone navigation products. The company once offered a substantial number of GPS-enabled Palm OS and Windows Mobile handhelds, which, to the chagrin of their many fans, were discontinued a couple of years ago.

Those device's were PDAs. Nuvifone isn't a smartphone, however. After all, it doesn't run on an open operating system. Rather, it's more of a feature phone with a number of advanced features, the most important of which is its GPS functions.

As with Garmin's GPS-only products, nuvifone sports a touch screen—measuring 3.5 inches in nuvifone case. Turn the screen on and you'll see icons labeled Call, Search, and View Map, representing nuvifone's most important functions.

Simply dock nuvifone in its vehicle mount to turn on the handset’s GPS radio, activate its navigation menu (which is similar to nuvi’) and enable hands-free calling, even when your in the middle of a call.

Nuvifone ships with preloaded maps of North America, Eastern and Western Europe, or both, and allows drivers to find a specific street address, establishment's name or search for a destination by category using a database with millions of points of interest.

These points of interests are greatly enhanced through support for Google local search capability, which nuvifone links to through a 3G cellular-wireless data connection.

Turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions guide the user to their destination. If they miss a turn along the route, nuvifone – as with nuvi – automatically recalculates the route and gets them back on track, speaking the names of the streets along the way.

In addition to Web browsing, users can make use of nuvifone's wireless connectivity to send and receive e-mail, text, and instant messages, and to subscribe to Garmin Online to receive constantly updated real-time traffic, fuel prices, stock prices, sport scores, news reports, local events and weather forecasts.

You can play music and video on Nuvifone and take pictures or video with its integrated camera. However, unlike most other cell phone shooters, Nuvifone's allows you snap a picture and have it automatically tagged with the exact latitude and longitude reference of where it was taken. The phone also provides direct access to millions of geo-located landmark and sightseeing photographs at Google's Panoramio picture sharing site.

Garmin says nuvifone won't become available until the third quarter of this year. There’s been no word on pricing. To learn more about nuvifone, check out Garmin's Web site.