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E-TEN G500 and Mio A701

Author	Sandra Vogel
Published	11th May 2006
Manufacturer	Mio
Supplier	Global Positioning Systems
Price	£322.55 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed	£379.00 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price	Click here

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The Mio A701 is powered by an Intel PXA 270 running at 520MHz. You can trade off battery life against processor performance by using the Mio eUtility to choose between four different settings. The Auto setting performs adjustments on the fly depending on processor loading, and this is what I used throughout testing.

After hard resetting my review machine there was 62MB of free storage, before installing any navigation software. Depending on your choice of navigation software, you should get a fair bit more free memory from the SD card it is delivered on.

The Mio A701 has a tweaked Windows Mobile 5.0 Today screen which offers two ranges of icons to assist with software launching and device management. A tiny row of icons at the bottom right lets you perform a number of things. You can flip the screen to and from landscape mode, see the battery level, manage Bluetooth and go to the close programs menu. From here you can also manually download Ephemeris data (this helps the GPS antenna fix your position more quickly).

A much larger row of five icons sits in the centre of the Today screen, and can be configured to offer shortcuts to four applications. You can also tap a fifth icon to take you to an menu system more like that found on mobile phones than on PDAs.

Mio’s software extra, Location Call, lets you use the GPS antenna without navigation software, to send an emergency SMS. You preconfigure the number(s) to be called and then when you hold the volume down button for six seconds a message containing your latitude and longitude coordinates is sent.

On a standard battery test involving continuous playback of MP3 tunes with the screen forced to remain on I got a total of six hours 36 minutes of battery life. That’s about on a par with other Windows Mobile 5.0 devices I’ve seen, and almost identical to the E-TEN G500.

During navigation the speaker of the Mio A701 was loud and clear. The supplied car mounting gear includes a swan-neck style mount with solid plastic holder for the A701 itself, and cigarette lighter power cable. The Mio A701 is also supplied with a stereo headset, belt-clip style case, mains power adaptor, PC connection cable and spare stylus.

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