Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Mio P550 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator

Mio P550 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator

Engineering At its best

MIO P550 has a solid construction feel and MIO Map is EXCEPTIONAL. The smart zoom feature truely showcase user interface excellence. My 06 Jeep's factory navigation (which is made by Alpine with Navtech) does not even come close with the amount of features. Useful features include graphical display that informs you Satelite signal, user selectable display on car speed, time, and destination distance etc. Real time one touch to change map view to birdeye view, true North or direction. You can view the entire route before doing any edit on the routing. User selectable routing methods include shortest, fastest, by car or walking. The map is so detailed, it even shows incoming lane and center island. "My POI" feature allows user to set a large # of addresses limited only by the size of "disk" space. One can also create groups for addresses by state, city or anything one wishes. I would say give yourself 15 minutes to play thru the basic features. Because the operation system is Microsoft. So one would expect to know the importance of performing "CTRL_ALT_DELETE" which is simplified by a reset button. The Microsoft media player, as many Microsoft products, is not exactly stable and can take up a lot of memory. When one closes a program, Windows DOES NOT close it; you have to go to system setting in order to terminate any Microsoft applications. MIO map needs 6 MB to run; so one needs to know "how to operate" the OS a little. Mobile PowerPoint, Excel & Word are actually useless. If you need to use any of these software, Take your laptop with you. IE works fine but finding a free hotspot is getting harder. I have not tested SkyPE, so really can not say anything on phone call performance under 802.11G or B.

terrible PDA

It's really a terrible PDA with so poor quality. I bought it in November last year. It stopped working when I used the GPS last month, and when I tried to restart it, it formated itself. I had to restore the system and the map. Then this problem occurs again and again. Whenever I plug the charger in, it stops working. After some days it recovers. I contacted the customer service of MIO, the agent let me try this and try that. Now I still cannot use it. I asked for a return or a replacement, but they said no way.

Lousy piece of Equipment

The worst equipment you could ever buy. Firstly, it didn't come with any navigation software. I imagine some versions may come but mine didn't. After that, Mio gives you no support to buy a software. Battery life is just about negligible. Every time I wanted to use it, it was dead, even without having it on with the GPS function. When I finally got a navigation software, it is so slow, it tells you to turn after the corners. It constantly is looking for its position and never catches up with your driving. Only good for walking. As a Grand Finalle, it froze completely and never goes beyond the splash-screen. Hundreds of discussion groups on the Internet tell you what to do but seems that nobody can get theirs to go again. In summary: never used it for anything good!!!

No driver for windows vista

The GPS is helpful, but at this point is the only way I can use the product. The company has not made a driver for windows vista and when I was forced to buy a new computer when my computer crashed I got a windows vista computer. I spent alot of money on textbooks for work to download on the ppc and I can no longer use them because of the incompatibility with my computer. I tried to contact the company regarding this problem, but they don't seem to care.

P550 Review

I did some research on this product before hand and I've been using it for a couple of months now. This product does exactly as it says it will do. The wireless works great. My kid likes to play the games on it. The gps works well, the unit starts up and loads quickly. ok to the cons.. The gps sometimes takes 5 mins to find the gps which is kinda long when your waiting on it. But once locked it rarily lost signal, and if it did it would only be for a second. It says it has 11 million POIs. I found it didnt see streets or businesses that were built in the last couple years and I didnt see any way to update them. If I could go back, I would of still bought it. I am very happy with it. I put it in my cupholder, and slide it under the seat when not using.



Keyword : mio

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