Mitac Mio 269 Review

Overall Rating

Full European street level maps included.
Cheap(ish). Good hardware. Accessories (External, Aerial, Bike Mount, Remote Control).

Slightly flaky software. Battery life. No full postcode searching.

Bought this to help me with work travelling and it's pretty good for the price I paid (£400). The unit is neat and seems well built but the software is a bit clunky. Full postcode searches are not possible although partial ones (BD23 9) are. It can therefore take some time to find your destination in the database if you don't know the exact address. There's a "points of interest" option that is useful though - allows things like, "find the nearest petrol station". Unfortunately it's not customisable. There is the function to save destinations and given the 269's 2.5Gb hard drive you could store a lot! Directions are either 2 or 3D but I found that the refresh rate of the 3D view was too slow - 2d is fine with plenty of information. There's a nice option which matches the zoom of the view to the speed you are doing. This means you get nice big views of junctions and roundabouts as you slow down and plenty of advanced notice of tight bends on fast roads. Voice commands (female only) are in general, well timed and not nearly as irritating as some other units I've heard. They do take a bit of getting used to though. You soon learn to virtually ignore the "bear left / right" commands as they are often totally irrelevant or even wrong! I now glance at the map to verify a turn. Routing is either fastest or shortest which can be a bit limiting. I recently planned a route up to North Wales using MS Autoroute and then programmed a few waypoints into the Mio which worked very well even if it did take a while to prepare.

The 269 has a built in MP3 player and the ability to synch up to MS Outlook contacts. The latter would be brilliant if you could scroll to a contact and then navigate to them. Unfortunately, you can't and as such it's a complete waste of time!

Generally I think the 269 is very good value for money. For the same price as the Tomtom Go you get full European street level mapping in a much neater package. The software lets it down a bit but as it's V1.0 - I guess you can't expect too much. I've grown used to it and would find it very difficult to go back to the old AA maps!