Product Reviews

The A201 GPS PDA is the replacement for Mio's great-value 168. It's a GPS and PDA combination, so you can use it to find your way home and as a diary and a place to store all your contacts.

The A201 is slightly thicker than a normal PDA, but it's still compact. It feels better-made than its predecessor, as it's built from tough-feeling plastic. The 168's flimsy antenna was one of its weak points, but the A201's has a durable-feeling hinge and locks into place with a firm click. The antenna rotates on its hinge to get the best GPS reception, but the added bulk means the PDA wobbles when you try to use it on a desk. The joystick below the screen is a disappointment, as it is too short to be easy to use and has a spongy action.

High-end PDAs such as Dell's X51v have high-resolution 480x640 displays, but the A201 makes do with a standard 320x240 LCD. The screen is bright and has excellent viewing angles, making it ideal for mounting in a car, but it has a slightly grainy texture. The screen's surface is also quite rough, so scrolling up and down with the stylus can set your teeth on edge.

The A201 comes with

ADVERTISEMENT

the latest Windows Mobile 5 operating system, and the PDA is fast enough to run the OS smoothly. Unfortunately, with the Mio Map 2.0 navigation software installed, only 12MB of the PDA's 64MB storage is available for your documents. However, Mio provides the A201 with a 512MB SD card and maps for all of Europe, which goes some way towards making up for this.

Mio Map 2.0 is based on the Navigon mapping software. To enter an address to navigate to, you have to enter a city or the first four characters of a postcode, followed by the street name and number. You can't just type in a street name and choose the correct road from a list, which makes it hard to navigate to roads in the country if you don't know their postcode or nearest town. The software is easy to use but runs very slowly; when typing in postcodes or street names, the unit takes an age to catch up with you. We didn't have these problems with the 168.

The A201 found a GPS fix in less than a minute, and route-planning is significantly faster than the 168. Plotting a route from the Shopper offices in the West End to South London took 12 seconds, and planning a trip to Edinburgh took one minute and 30 seconds, a full minute less than the 168. This is still far slower than many GPS systems, though.

On the road, the A201's clear maps and excellent voice prompts make navigation easy, but the 3D display is jerky, which wasn't a problem on the 168. Fortunately, the 2D view is fine.

Mio's A201 is better built than its predecessor and has the advantage of the latest Windows Mobile 5 OS. It is still excellent value for a Europe-wide GPS system, but while it plots routes quickly, it runs the Navigon software much slower than the 168.