Unlike many truly mobile GPS solutions that require you to pair the receiver unit with a phone and then walk along looking like Charlie Chaplin as you try to keep satellite lock, the Mio is an all in one solution. It measures 11.7cm by 5.9cm by 2.2cm and weighs 150g, it is noticeably longer than your average smartphone due to the GPS antenna and its thicker too. Of course the Mio A701 has to be kept pointing at the sky but at least you don't need 2 hands or look like a Wally when using it.

The A701 Smartphone runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 and Intel’s 520MHz PXA 270 with 128mb or ROM and 64 Mb of RAM, however on our first look there was around 33Mb free memory so just as well the maps are on a 512Mb SD card. Alongside the PDA like features there is a Tri Band GPRS / GSM mobile phone and a SiRF StarIII GPS chipset promising high levels of accuracy.

Our first day with the Mio had us wondering in in fact this was a 3 in one device, phone / PDA and GPS, we were soon to test the Phone part as a call came in while LP was on his way to work having swapped his SIM card in. As a mobile the RF performance seemed on a par with an average mobile and the sound quality was pretty good. The main downside is the size as it's like clamping and iPaq to the side of your face to make a call, not good should you be illegally using it while driving (not that we were).

The PDA features are nothing more than the standard WM5 fare, but these have come on a long way meaning that a sync he night before had provided our full address book and last 100 emails on the unit along with a few key documents like the spec of the unit and some other user guides. Clearly if we'd have planned this a bit better LP would have had a cradle of some kind in the car so we could have used it to navigate the journey, instead we waited until we arrived at the office and could set-up the GPS and maps over a coffee.

The 512Mb SD card came pre loaded with the UK and Ireland maps, the rest of Europe lives on a DVD and you can push maps onto the SD card s required, there should be room for a few counties to like on the card at the same time. We fired it up just outside the office to get that all important first TTF (time to fix) which came in at an impressive 30 seconds. The Mio Maps software is the same as on the other Mio devices although it seems better optimised for the 5.0 environment and 2.7" screen of the A701. We set in a simple address using postcode and let the Smartphone calculate the route, sadly Mio only supports the first 4 digits and therefore we had to hone the location from the presented options on screen.

Those in the know will be aware that Mio Maps is in fact a re-brand of the Navigon software which is a little fiddly and slow, we noted that the initial calculations were slower than our TomTom unit and the same route took just under 20 seconds longer to plot than the Dutch unit. This may not be an issue on foot but for in car use it did lengthen route re calculation times which can be critical when driving in central London.

The integration with Outlook under Windows Mobile 5 does allow the Mio to navigate to a contact which proved far easier than tapping in an address using the stylus or D pad. The downside is having to keep your contacts addresses up to date which we are particularly bad at! Before setting off it is a good idea to select a profile a bit like the Pocket Loox N100 we tested, there is a profile for foot, bike and car which adjusts slightly the screen layout and also ETA times. Instructions are both on screen as with all Mio Maps and voice prompts. In order to hear the spoken instructions you will probably need to attach some earphones to the 3.5mm jack as the speaker is very weedy, we struggled to hear it in car and on a busy street you might as well give up.

Despite some minor niggles the A701 got us to our first destination whereby it was duly tucked away while we went to a meeting, on emerging from the central London location we set in a tube station a distance away and selected the pedestrian mode. Despite some high surrounding buildings the Mio kept enough satellites locked on and managed to steer us left and right through London's streets including using an alleyway that wouldn't have featured on a cars route (clever).

Mid way on our walking Nav test a call interrupted the instructions and duly stuffed the phone so we couldn't answer the call or get the navigation back, we ended up having to use a soft reset to get it back to life. This is the moment that the 20 second PDA start up becomes annoying as we worried our caller may be trying again. Sure enough the call came through OK and we did some rather embarrassed apologies for our latest bit of tech. Not a good start for the Mio.

Next back to an in car test and we discovered that Mio had sent us a windscreen mount after all, so with it sat in the car window we made our way out of London with Mio Maps in control. After throwing a few wrong turns and using a variety of roads we concluded that while the A701 isn't ideal for in car navigation it is at least up to the standard of other PDA based systems.

We have heard of TomTom 5 running some some A701's without issues as the GPS signal is available to the Windows OS, however this adds significant cost and throws away the Mio Map investment. Battery life was another crucial area of our testing, clearly a PDA / Smartphone with Bluetooth switched on and a GPS system was going to eat some watts, indeed our first set of tests killed the unit in just over 3 hours of use. With limited GPS use and Bluetooth switched off we managed to eek out nearer 4 hours but we'd recommend having a power cord for in car use and a charger both at home and at work. In its basic smartphone only mode it managed to survive for just under 2 days with a few calls but little all else.

Overall the Mio A701 GPS Smartphone is quite a convincing package, we like the styling and converged applications, the GPS is good although not prefect and the PDA features are whatever Windows packages in 5.0. Downsides are the relatively low battery life and occasional software lock up and then there is the overall bulk of which is a fairly beefy Smartphone.

On sale for around £435 with MioMaps the A701 isn't cheap, but compare that to a Smartphone + GPS system and you'll get a more accurate comparison. It is also available without Mio Maps for around £350.

or without Mio Maps

Published - 18/02/2007

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