Garmin International this evening unveiled the product company executives called “our future”: a touchscreen wireless phone that combines features of Garmin’s nuvi portable navigators with those found in cutting edge smartphones.

The new device, named the nuvifone, “is the breakthrough product that cell phone and GPS users around the world have been longing for — a single device that does it all,” said Cliff Pemble, Garmin’s president and chief operating officer.

The No. 1 U.S. maker of portable navigation devices, based in Olathe, threw a posh, invitation-only event at Gotham Hall in Manhattan. The event included a preview of Garmin’s Super Bowl commercial.

With the nuvifone, Garmin is entering the crowded mobile phone market, an industry dominated by such corporate giants as Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and, most recently, Apple. Garmin, in fact, will be competing with the company that supplies its digital maps. Finland’s Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, is acquiring Chicago mapmaker Navteq in a move to add more navigation features to mobile phones.

But the move into wireless could be critical for Garmin.

Navigation on mobile phones isn’t new – several companies including Garmin sell navigation services that can be accessed on mobile phones – new research projects that phones with built-in navigation will soon overshadow the traditional portable GPS market.

Telematics Research Group issued a study earlier this month, projecting that navigation-enabled phones will outsell portable navigation devices in 2009. Garmin wants to be in on that trend, so later this year it will begin shipping the nuvifone, a sleek silver phone dominated by a 3 ½-inch touchscreen display.

The slim phone allows users to get audible turn-by-turn directions, access Wi-Fi networks, take photos with automatically tagged locations, play MP3 music files, see Web sites in HTML as they would on a home computer…and even make a phone call.

Some details weren’t disclosed, including the suggested retail price.

Garmin executives said they were negotiating with wireless companies around the world, but currently weren’t announcing any carrier partners.

Kansas City’s Sprint Nextel, however, won’t be among them.

The nuvifone uses 3.5G technology, a high-speed wireless system incompatible with Sprint but used in Europe and Asia by many companies, and in some areas of the U.S. by AT&T Wireless.

Garmin also showed what will be its second Super Bowl commercial, this one showing a seemingly driver-less car being guided through the French countryside by a Garmin device. It turns out the driver wasn’t missing or non-existent, just short. None other than Napoleon emerges from the car to greet his troops, and as strikes his classic pose as he tucks his Garmin device into his jacket.

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