GPS Review: Mio 269 - "Mediocre"
In a recent CNet review, the Mio 269 was knocked for its sluggish performance and a messy interface. The Mio is a hard drive based GPS device that gives you a bit of room to store MP3's to play later - although not while you are navigating for some terrible reason. so while Moi's website claims to have 500MB free for MP3 storage, and the box says 700MB, the actual drive shows 1GB free, whoops. I guess the tech dept didn't talk to the packaging department on this one. Not a terrible mistake. It gets worse, read on......
"The Mio 269 incorporates most of the usual GPS navigation features, including automatic route recalculation, a POI database, and a trip planner. By tapping an onscreen icon, you can display 2D and 3D maps in both day and nighttime modes. To route yourself home from any location, just press the Home button--a major convenience. Walkers and potentially even cyclists will appreciate the Mio's Walker mode, which creates pedestrian-friendly routes with no freeways involved.
However, to take advantage of any of these features, you should plan on reading the user manual from start to finish. We've rarely had so much trouble using a GPS as we had with the Mio 269. Slow responsiveness is one part of the problem; the messy destination-selection screen is another. There's also an annoying disconnect between the main menu (used to select navigation, music, contact, and setup options), the MioMap application that handles navigation, and the Home button on the Mio itself.
After reading the clear, comprehensive, and nicely illustrated 127-page user guide, we had a much easier time with the device. The guide helps overcome some--but not all--of the difficulty in using the destination-selection screen, which is half keyboard and half a jumble of text, icons, and tiny scroll buttons. You will frequently need to retract the keyboard, since it leaves merely one visible line of search results. Even worse, it contains only letters; to access numbers, you have to tap twice on what looks like a refresh icon."
It appears that there was another oversight in designing how the addressbook interacts with the device. So if you copy your addressbook into the device, would you maybe want to navigate to one of those addresses? Apparently you can't. "You can't automatically navigate to a contact's address or even look up an address while the navigation software is running."
All in all, a 4.3 out of 10 - mediocre. Could this just be a little tough on Mio?
Wow, tough fall for such an attractive feature set and such a nice design job on the outside.
You can see our other postings on the Mio 269 for background: Announcement, and then first review from the Inquirer, also a pretty good overview and first hand review from DV Hardware, and also a fairly positive review here through MobileMag.
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Posted by Scott Martin at August 31, 2005 5:25 PM
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