Garmin-Asus is showing the Garmin-Asus nüvifone A50, a touchscreen Android-powered smartphone with multiple location technologies and apps. The A50 benefits from the personalization and enhanced features offered by the Android platform, and also includes Garmin navigation with turn-by-turn, voice prompted directions for use in a car or while walking. Location features are designed into virtually every function including email, text messaging, and photos.

The elegant and thin A50 has a 3.5-inch HVGA capacitive touchscreen display that incorporates a finger-friendly user interface. The QWERTY touchscreen keyboard makes it easy to send and receive messages, and predictive text helps customers type faster. It also comes with hardware features like 4GB internal storage, an expandable microSD card slot, and accelerometer so every screen can be viewed in portrait or landscape mode.

The A50 integrates Google mobile services with one-click access to Google Search by voice, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube™, calendar, contacts and Android Market™, where users can find more than 20,000 applications to expand and personalize their phone to fit their lifestyle.

The A50 includes on-device sync with Microsoft Exchange server, with the ability to wirelessly synchronize contacts, calendar and enterprise email. Account setup is quick and easy, and in a few simple steps users will have their contacts, calendar and email ready to go.

The A50 receives its location (latitude and longitude) information from multiple sources including satellite, network-based and terrestrial sources. These overlapping technologies ensure that A50 customers have the best location and navigation experience a smartphone can offer.

The A50 also supports cityXplorer maps so that customers can plan and use routes that include public transit options such as bus, tramway, metro and suburban rail systems. cityXplorer content is available as an optional download for select cities. Thanks to the A50’s e-compass, customers will know their heading even when standing still.

The A50 includes a three mega-pixel camera with auto-focus that automatically geotags images with an exact latitude and longitude reference of where the photo was taken. Customers may then save the image so they can navigate back to the location, or email the geo-tagged image to friends.

The Garmin-Asus nüvifone A50 is expected to be available in Europe in the first half of 2010. Specific availability and pricing details will be given in the future.