Mio A701 GPS smart phone

Just above the screen is the earpiece and below the screen are four buttons - Call, Call End/Cancel/Power, Windows Media Player and MioMap - and a five-way navigation control. What it desperately needs are two further buttons under the screen - there's plenty of space for them - to control Windows Mobile 5's soft menus.

Mio supplies a full set of accessories with the A701, including the aforementioned car cradle with a suction cup arm, an in-car charger, an AC adaptor with UK and EU plugs, a USB cable, a carrying case, an extra stylus and three screen protectors. This is a pretty good bundle and there isn't really anything missing.

I'd suggest you don't leave home without the in-car charger though, as the A701 eats away the battery charge when you're using the GPS unit: don't expect to get more than two or three hours' life out of it in navigation mode.

You can buy the A701 with or without the MioMap 2.0 route-planning and navigation software. It generally works well and is well-suited to the A701, but it's not without its drawbacks. The user interface takes a while to get used to and it is actually quite hard to use on the relatively small screen. The icons just aren't big enough and you have to take the stylus out all the time, something that doesn't work if you want to make a quick adjustment while you're stuck at a traffic light. To be fair to Mio there is a warning message every time you start up the MioMap software that tells you not to operate the device while driving - it's illegal to operate a mobile phone while driving in many countries - but the warning's of limited value when the software forces you to use the stylus so often.