Review: Mio Navman Spirit 500

The Mio Navman Spirit range marks the return of the Mio name to the UK PND market, after a couple of years of selling their devices solely under the Navman brand. The models bring the company’s products up to date, and gave us the chance to revisit the iPhone inspired interface that we first witnessed on the Navman S100.

The Sprit 500 retains the trademark wafer thin profile as its distant cousin, incorporating a larger 4.7” recessed screen, a flush touch sensitive main menu button to the side and an on/off slider at the top. Additionally the car cradle slots into the back of the device securely and sticks firmly to the windscreen.

Once up and running you can start to play around with the slide-touch interface which features a series of large colourful icons, scrollable lists and dockable menus (map view) that can be manipulated using finger swipes/presses – think iPhone.

Operationally the slide-touch system does require you to apply more pressure on the screen but with practice it becomes very responsive from a driving position. If you feel that you still can’t get on with the it you can disable the scrolling completely and go back to good old fashioned button presses.

However the sensitivity of the main menu button did sometimes scupper matters from a handheld position as we occasional kept catching it with a trailing finger and was dumped back to the main menu at inappropriate times.

On a positive note for routing to destinations you’ll be able to import NavPix Geo-tagged images via the supplied MioMore desktop 2 PC software and the effective keyword searching was joined by the ability to refine full postcodes with a house number (amongst other things).

Pressing the capture icon from the main menu can also be used to quickly save your current route or location (with a pin placed on the map) and the ability to record a voice description as an alternative to the standard text is a nice idea.

By heading to the Explore option you can take advantage of the new POI search feature which allows you to press down on the map to reveal a spider web of all the nearby POI (expands available choices depending on zoom level).

Whilst useful we found that the above was better suited to larger towns/cities and the default POI set was a little out of date in places. To compensate you do get travel book guides and the ability to import custom POI from the desktop software or utilise the onboard Google ‘Local’ Search utility.

The above requires a link to a compatible Bluetooth (data enabled) phone and whilst setup was straight forward on our Nokia phones, it was a little fiddly to get the data link to work on our Windows Mobile devices.

Handsfree calling (as with voice recording) from a driving position was hampered by its microphone pickup performance as we had to speak pretty loudly in order to be heard by our recipient.

During driving our location could be picked up quickly and route calculations on the whole were nippy. Though we still found that we needed to experiment with the various driving profiles to improve route efficiency and the system still likes to recommend U-turns when going off the beaten track.

Of course you do have a true pedestrian profile to choose from which is ideal for routing around towns/cities on foot as it can take into consideration one way streets.

Text-to-speech directions were spoken loud and clear, but it’s just frustrating that we couldn’t control the volume from the front screen.

In general the display coped superbly in bright conditions and the 2D/3D map views were enhanced by a clutter free layout, great choice of colours and plenty of useful directional aides, including lane guidance, dots indicating the roads travelled on (handy for reverse routing), 12 month safety camera database and 3D motorway junctions views.

Only the road speed warnings let the above down as their accuracy was out on a couple of roads.

Finally you have an RDS Traffic receiver which can inform you verbally and visually about any problems on your route.

Unfortunately if you want to bypass the traffic incident you have to click on the warning message, wait for the system to re-calculate the route in the background (laggy) and then click on an ‘Avoid button’, so it’s not quite as intuitive as it could be.

However there’s still a lot to like about the Sprit 500 and at a good price point it is worth a look.

Price (as reviewed): £200
Web: eu.mio.com
Map coverage: Europe

Verdict: 7/10

Written by Brett James. Originally published in Smartphone Essentials.

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