Garmin Asus Nuvifone M10 review

Will fusing smartphones with sat navs make a compelling handset?

The definitive Garmin Asus Nuvifone M10 review
The definitive Garmin Asus Nuvifone M10 review

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Garmin asus nuvifone m10

The Garmin Asus Nüvifone M10 has a 5MP camera and quite surprisingly, given the level of attention to detail paid to other aspects of this smartphone, it's relatively basic.

There are very few tweaks and fancy features, though you can choose a widescreen photo shooting option that changes the pixel resolutions slightly. For example, shooting at 5MP in widescreen gives you 2592 x 1552 pixels while turning widescreen off changes this to 2592 x 1936.

There are preset white balance settings for a usual range of conditions – Sunny, Cloudy, Incandescent and Fluorescent as well as an Auto setting, a 2- and 10- second self-timer, and a very limited range of effects running to black and white, negative and sepia.

You can set the metering range to Average or Centre, which gives you a little control over how shots are handled, and there is a three-picture burst mode.

That, friends, is all you get.

There's no side button to launch the camera, though as you can put its icon on the main screen you can make a quick point-and-click photo fairly easily.

Garmin asus nuvifone m10

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The widescreen shooting mode gives you the chance to get a different view of a scene, and helps with long narrow views like this one. It's a pity you can't turn it on and off with a single screen press, though.

Garmin asus nuvifone m10 review

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Again the wide angle comes into its own here, letting us get more in our photo than we'd usually expect. The image is sharp and clear, too.

Garmin asus nuvifone m10 review

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Not surprisingly, the Garmin Asus Nüvifone M10 is no fan of shots taken into the sun. It really can't compensate for bright head-on conditions, though it did make a better stab at the task than we've seen from some cameras.

Garmin asus nuvifone m10 review

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With no flash onboard, you're never going to get great photos indoors except in perfect lighting conditions. The background to this photo is actually white, and the image itself has come out rather grainy.

Video capture can be made at a range of resolutions between 800 x 480 and 176 x 144. Our sample was shot at the higher resolution, and offers plenty of detail.

The camera was slow to adjust to changes in available light, but we did shoot this video on an extremely sunny day and at one point were looking right at the sun.