Mio C250: Cheap sat-nav, great Christmas gift
Tags: mio, family, interest, car
Are your friends or family members useless with directions? Are you tired of trying to describe nearby landmarks in a bid to get them to where you are? You might want to get your disoriented visitors a sat-nav for Christmas.
The Mio C250 costs a mere £170, which compared to other sat-navs is a bargain. It's pretty good, too, with a large, colour touchscreen, MioMap v3 software with seven-digit postcode search, full UK maps combined with the major roads of Europe provided by Tele Atlas, and a huge Points of Interest database.
The C250 also has in-car, lorry, pedestrian and bicycle modes, speed-camera warnings out of the box with free updates for one year, a built-in MP3 player, and support for traffic updates (with optional antenna and receiver).
The lithium battery can be charged using the bundled USB or cigarette lighter charger, and the built-in SiRFstarIII GPS technology means that you can speedily find out where you are.
Another great feature is that the C250 isn't massive, measuring 108mm by 85mm by 21mm and weighing 150g. Overall, we were impressed with its price and feature set -- this is definitely worth checking out if you fancy getting yourself or somebody else a gadget as a gift. -AL
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AnonymousSat 2 December, 2006 6:09pm
My father has just got one of these, which I have been trying out in my car. I must admit I am quite impressed. I have had a Garmin eTrex Legend for five years, so am not a newcomer to GPS. But this is obviously much better for in-car use, despite my fingers being too big to properly operate the touchscreen controls. I am tempted to buy one myself, but Mio seem to be a lesser-known brand - I'd never heard of them. Searching online I cannot find much info about these units. Would I be better off getting one of the Garmin Streetpilots for similar money? I must say I have no problem at all with this unit, but is a Garmin a better bet, with better support? Any deals to check out at the moment would be most appreciated. Thanks.
AnonymousMon 11 December, 2006 12:40pm
In my opinion the Mio brand is a lot better than Garmin, fair enough that it perhaps hasnt been around as long but I've owned both a garmin i3 and a nuvi 300 before biting the bullet and getting one of these C250s from www.easydevices.co.uk and it easily outperforms both of them in terms of routing times and just general performance. They also have a 2 year warranty in case anything does go wrong.
AnonymousMon 11 December, 2006 6:32pm
cheapest i`ve seen is at navcity.co.uk(169.99)bargain.
AnonymousTue 19 December, 2006 12:01pm
Great product - got mine from supergps.co.uk for 169.99 came next day
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AnonymousMon 27 November, 2006 6:30pm
I had my eye on one of these for Christmas but like all gadgety things I couldn't wait and ended up buying one from EasyDevices.co.uk. You pretty much sum the device up as being a great all round portable sat nav device but the blurb forgot to mention the coolest part! You can also get a seperate antenna which plugs into the Mio C250 and downloads live traffic information to alert you about traffic accidents and delays. This costs about an extra £60 but is well worth it. 10/10 from me!!