Mio C620t GPS receiver review

Can Mio challenge TomTom and Navman with this model?

22 November 2007 12:16 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Mio's latest satnav solution comes with 3D maps complete with landmarks, but is it just gimmickry or does it actually help your driving? We take to the road to find out.

The Mio C620t comes with a 4.3-inch widescreen as found in the competition from TomTom, Garmin and Navman. The device is slim so it can fit in your bag or coat pocket, and then there are the usual mount clips so you can attach it to your windscreen.

Overall the design is pretty nondescript really with all the focus being placed on the software inside rather than the design on the outside. The windscreen mount is large and bulbous and you won't be able to take it with you away from the car no matter how much you want to.

Power the C620t (t standing for traffic) up and you get access to all the roads of Europe rather than just the UK. You'll also get a pelthora of Points-of-interest to bore yourself with including rather worryingly where the nearest Tesco is.

Beyond the standard points of interest and you can program your routes in three different ways; fastest, quickest and most interesting of all, least amount of turns. We aren't sure why you would need this, but if you want to stay on the straight and narrow I suppose this one will be for you.

In driving mode and you also get plenty of choice. You can opt for a aerial view, a 2D view and the 3D view that guides you into the screen.

In addition to the road mapping, and taking advantage of the widescreen display, you can opt to have additional information displayed such as time to arrival, current speed, distance to arrival and suchlike or merely the next set of five directions so you have some idea of what's ahead.

When you haven't programmed a destination in, the device merely gives you random stats including a massive analogue clock to fill the space.

For those looking for even more features away from the core satnav feature set, the Mio C620t includes the ability to play MP3 files and access your phonebook via Bluetooth (built-in).

In use and we found that although the Mio C620t promises the state of the art GPS chipset and processor, on a number of occasions it struggled to keep up with the pace of our car telling us that we still had some 30-50m to go when in fact we were on the turning. Additionally its strange approach to roundabouts made it very confusing as to which exit you had to take.

Verdict

Overall the mapping, and there ease of use is very good. We didn't manage to find any of the promised 1000 3D landmarks in our drive around the country as promised by Mio with this software iteration however, making it a selling point that is unlikely to make a difference to your daily commute.

Stopping it from getting top marks, we were disappointed with the speed of the GPS fix when out on the road, and on more than one occasion on a 5-hour test drive to Wales we had to "do a u-turn where possible".

Good but not without its faults.