Was it not just the other day that I was wishing and hoping for a handheld gadget that used GPS and cellphone-tower triangulation to tell you where you were?

I had not heard about this particular gadget until I ran across a post about it on Gadget Crunch this morning, but then, when I got to Engadget, not only did they have the announcement news, they even had first-hand photos of the thing as it was displayed at a trade show booth this week.

This picture from Engadget shows the Nuviphone (right) next to the iPhone.  Everybody and his brother has made some iPhone-like device in the last few months, but I have hopes that this will be a good one because it comes from one of the two Big Dogs in the GPS device space.

Lately, I’ve been giving some thought to getting the iTouch (or iPod Touch, as it’s officially known) as a pocket device for online connectivity in lieu of buying something like the Asus Eee sub-notebook.  Steverino’s MacWorld keynote last week really pushed me from idle consideration to serious thought, since the smaller iTouch is only a couple hundred bucks.  I’m not interested in being trapped as a Cingular…excuse me, AT&T phone customer, so I thought the iTouch would be preferrable to the iPhone itself.  But since the primary needs I think I have for such a device are Internet connectivity and street-level map-positioning, and not MP3 or movie watching, I would be more than willing to give the Nuviphone a more serious look once pricing and service plans are announced.