Mio P550 > Reviews > Mio P550 GPS PDA

Author's product rating:   

Look & Feel	Excellent
Memory / capacity	Satisfactory
Comfort & Portability	Excellent
Ease of use	Easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Accurate, Good Value for money, uses SD cards
Disadvantages:	Poor battery life

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

When purchasing the Mio P550 I was after a navgation system that could easily be put in my car then arriving at my destination easily fitting in my pocket for security.
The Mio P550 is a nice shape and size meaning it does fit nicely in your pocket unlike most brick shaped GPS systems you tend to find.
What is even better is its also a PDA, so not just will it tell you where to go, it will be your personal organiser, your mp3 player, your mobile internet. So many great features on one small device!

The MioMap software that it comes with isnt the easiest to use at first, some of the features are hard to get to. However it does its job really well once you learn how to use it - please note that when putting in postcodes it just uses the first 4 characters. If you choose to however you could purchase TomTom software and easily install it. With MioMap not all the maps will fit on 1 SD card so you will be supplied with a CD with all the maps of Europe on and you quite simply attach it to your computer and transfer them on.

You can play music on this PDA however I tend not to as the built in speaker doesnt sound the best when playing music and I do not have any headphones with the correct jack to fit the PDA.

I find the WLAN feature very useful on this PDA as it means you can easily connect to a wireless network and pick up your emails or use MSN Pocket Messenger.

The only down side with this product is how long the battery lasts, the battery does not last long at all when navigating, using wireless networks or bluetooth. This doesnt cause a problem when in the car as the cigarette lighter keeps it powered but struggles to charge the device.

On day I somehow managed to crash my PDA, I tried and tried to get it to work, turning it on and off and doing the master reset as it said in the manual and it was still crashing on startup. I sent an email to mio about it asking if there was any other ways of restarting it. After about a week I managed to get it to start up and it was running slowly because too many programs were running, after closing some it came back under control. About 2 weeks later I got a reply to my email to Mio which was useless and looked like it had been translated.

Overall its a good value for money peice of kit.....and bubble breaker is an addictive game