Mio A701 user reviews

marc dorin 7 June 2007

Good: Price (350 euro), GPS, PDA

Bad: Nothing

Comment: Super

Shaun Wallace 31 May 2007

Good: Everything

Bad: No WiFi

Peter Albert 9 August 2006

Good: GPS receiver is fantastic... more sensitive than most dedicated Sifr III receivers I tried

Bad: Text messaging requires the stylus. Technical support is not very responsive.

Comment: This is not a device for typical corporate users, who may need faster connectivity than GPRS to download those large email attachments.

But it is perfect if you need GPS, a phone, and a PDA for contacts and agenda, all compacted in a small, very elegant case, with a brilliant, readable screen.
This means: most normal users, who do not care much in practice about Wi-Fi (but you may buy a cheap, small Wi-Fi card) or UMTS (who really wants to make a video call?).

The Mio A701 has a spectacular GPS receiver (working also with other navigation software).
It is also a good WM5 PDA, with a brilliant screen (but *not* in direct sunlight, although I have seen worse screens) and a good phone. The only real annoyance to me is that Mio does not support one-handed text messaging... you have to use the stylus to prepare an SMS, or find a third-party application to allow it!

Bluetooth is a little buggy (as usual), but it seems to have been fixed in some new firmware version (which however has not been officially released yet). Camera is decent, but do not expect too much.

Of the various PDAs I had (iPaq 1940 and 2210, Loox N 520, Treo 650), I only miss the keyboard and the user interface of my Treo 650 (but the Treo was much bigger, buggier and had that horrible antenna).

Juan Juanillo 22 July 2006

Good: Good GPS, powerful PDA, good GSM/GPRS Phone

Bad: Screen in daylight, speaker's volume too low

Comment: It's amazing to be able to have with me all the time my cellphone(w/camera) and my pda and my gps device. Globally speaking the Mio has a superb performance and the size makes it trull portable in all situations. The only objection is the screen at a sunny day... you won't see anything, and the speakers (at least for me) should have more power, especially when you try to speak handsfree on your car. I don't care about the lack of wi-fi because I have had many pdas before and rarely use it, I prefer to be able to download data or use the messenger through gprs (that is truly mobile!).
In conclusion, I have been using this device for 3 months and travelling with it in Spain and France, and I can tell you, from now on, I don't think I'll live without a device like this one in my pocket

Piotr Weitzell 7 June 2006

Good: Styling

Bad: Functionality

Comment: What a waste of money. This device fails to be usable as a phone and has too many problems to be useful as a PDA.

Stick to separate devices.

Anonymous 4 June 2006

Good: GPS works well, compact size, better battery than you'd think

Bad: No overall mute button, no Wi-Fi, occasional lockups

Comment: Solid effort. It doesn't have everything, but with a Wi-Fi card you have all you'd ever need. Great size and battery is better than you'd expect.

Richard Pearce 30 April 2006

Good: Pretty much everything you need

Bad: Compact screen means very small on-screen keyboard

Comment: It has GPS, a camera and Windows Mobile 5.0. This is the closest device I have had to hauling my computer around with me, especially with the cheapness of SD/MMC cards of a substantial size, which can give a very useful storage capacity for GPS navigation maps and programs as well as multimedia and other user data. There's full integration of internet apps like Messenger and Hotmail access on the move. The built-in camera produces images which rival high-end webcams but it's poor in low light and it has no flash.