Nokia Corp.’s announcement Thursday of free voice navigation for its GPS smartphones is bound to affect some GPS vendors, such as Garmin Ltd. and TomTom Inc.

There has already been a short-term impact; the stock prices of both of those companies declined Thursday. Longer term, the trend toward offering free navigation tools will enhance the value of multifunction smartphones, especially for Nokia, which makes more mobile phones than any manufacturer but has performed poorly in the U.S.

“Nokia’s done incredibly bad in the U.S., but I wonder if this free navigation might give them the edge to increase smartphone market share there,” said ABI Research analyst Dominique Bonte in a telephone interview.

Apple Inc. will have no choice but to offer navigation for free on the iPhone, given the pressure from Nokia and from Google Inc.’s Android phones, Bonte said. But Apple will face a dilemma with developers, because it already sells many third-party GPS applications in its AppStore. “Apple can’t stay behind and will have to have turn-by-turn themselves,” and it might even acquire a company to do so, Bonte added.

The Nokia news led to an 11% drop in the price of TomTom shares in trading in Amsterdam, and to a 5.5%…

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — Navigational device maker Garmin Ltd. will start selling its oft-delayed wireless phone in Asia within the next month, Chief Operating Officer Cliff Pemble told shareholders Friday.

Speaking at the company’s annual meeting in suburban Kansas City, Pemble said the nuvifone will go on sale in selected Asian markets in late June or early July. But he said a release date for North America and Europe is still on hold.

“We believe we’re getting very close,” Pemble said in response to a question from an investor.

The nuvifone, two designs of which were on display at the meeting, is a touch-screen smartphone with features of Garmin’s line of Global Positioning System-powered devices, such as turn-by-turn driving directions, traffic warnings and a search engine for nearby restaurants and stores.

Originally announced in January 2008, the nuvifone is Garmin’s entry into the cellular phone market and considered key to the company’s future. Cell phone carriers have increasingly been chipping away at Garmin’s market, adding navigational features to their phones.

But the device’s commercial release has been delayed repeatedly — it was originally supposed to be on sale in the first half of this year — as Garmin has worked to iron out technical…

Ever since the Garmin Nuvi 880 was announced at CES 2008, we’ve been excited to get our hands on this portable navigation system. Given the good track record of the other Nuvi series devices, we expected more of the same, solid feature list and good performance. However, we were most looking forward to taking its speech recognition capabilities out for a test drive. To be honest, we were a bit weary since we’ve tried other such-equipped GPS devices, including the Magellan Maestro 4250 and the TomTom GO 930, and while they worked, there weren’t the most accurate and the capabilities were limited. This isn’t so with the Nuvi 880. We were blown away at the accuracy of the speech recognition, the range of features you can use it with, and its overall ease of use. This, in combination with the navigation offerings, sleek design, and solid performance, makes it worthy of our Editors’ Choice award. The only downfall is that you’re going to pay for these features. The Garmin Nuvi 880 has a price tag of $ 1,071.41, but you can probably find it for a bit less online.

Design

Like the rest of the Nuvi series, the Garmin Nuvi 880 is…