Mitac Mio 168 - is it worth it?

oscis · Occasional Visitor Joined: Dec 28, 2003 Posts: 1

I am an absolute newbe - both to PDAs and GPS, this forum is proving to be very helpful to me. I thought it would be prudent to ask for advice from some more experianced and knowledgeable folk before waisting more of my hard earned beer tokens Rolling Eyes

I am currently in Hong Kong for a couple of weeks and whilst shopping here I've decided that I really do *need* a PDA with built-in GPS!!

The only PDA I could find with an inbuilt GPS reciever was the Mio 168, and it works out to be *very* cheap in comparison at £160, helped by a very good exchange rate!!

At present it only comes with local (Chinese) and US maps which is obviously useless for me when I return to the UK

I understand that if this PDA is NMEA 0183v2 compatable then I will be able to find some software with UK maps to use the inbuilt reciever.

As a newbe I really don't have any faith in my judgement on this issue to be competant, would you guys aniticipate problems getting software such as tomtom to work on this PDA?

Are there any other issues I havent considered that should influence my decision?

If this does turn out to be a good buy then I should be able to source these PDAs for other forum members fairly regularily if there's any demand..

Cheers,
Tom

Dave · Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2003 7:26 pm Post subject:

You are correct, providing the GPS Receiver is NMEA 0183 compliant, then there shouldn't be any issues. The only issue I can forsee and might arise is that it may not advertise itself as being on a COM port, or a COM port 1-9, which could post problems as most software will only look at COM 1-9. We have seen in the past some GPS Receivers in some Pocket PC's being detected as COM0 or COM A and these can be problematic to work with.

The only things I would say about the Mitac Mio 168 is that it is running a slower processor at 300Mhz (most WM2003 Pocket PC's run 400Mhz now), it also lacks a second storage slot as it only supports SD and not Compact Flash (CF). This may restrict you to other add-on devices later.

Pc-Mobile · Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 1:49 pm Post subject:

Yes the Mio is very attractively priced and it would sell tons if similar packages are available elsewhere.
Slower processor is not really a problem.
I do not have a chance to play with it.
(understandably, we have absolutely no interest in it)
The only possible problem for it to use elsewhere is whether any software can make use of the built in GPS.

This was not possible with the iQue (they are being worked at)
and I imagine it is the same with the Mio.

However, the built in software had been available for other PPC for sometime so it might not be that difficult (or even possible now) for it to use other mapping software.
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Pc-Mobile
http://pc-mobile.net/gps.htm

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