 MIO 310 is very bad product Strengths: Good MP3 player
Weaknesses: Useless GPS
Summary: I would like to upgrade from my old Garmin eMap to something with larger and color screen. This is my second GPS which I bought recently and returned the same day. See my previous review for Magellan Roadmate 300.
The MIO 310 is very bad product.
The screen display had very unpleasant ghost like shadow around fonts. It looked like old TV which is loosing colors.
These are the problems which I found and which make this GPS waste of money:
Software is absolutely terrible! The programmer was probably smoking or sniffing something when working on it. I am very good in computers, but I was in many occasions totally lost. You cannot plan route on computer so you have to do it in GPS. I selected two cities 1500 km apart from Fort McMurray in Alberta to Kamloops BC. This process was quick, but there is almost no way to verify that it will guide you correct way. The screen is small so you have to zoom out to see whole route, which is problem. Everything disappears from the screen when zoomed out above 1.5 km (?) resolution. You just see green line between two points. You do not know whether you will be going through Jasper or Banff which are about 200 km apart. It basically tells you: “Trust me, I know which way to go”. Either you see very fine detail or nothing. I never have seen anything so bad even so the Magellan RoadMate 300 was not too far away from this one.
MIO gives you also option to load addresses from your Outlook, but does not give you any option to select which addresses to load. Before I knew it more that 300 addresses were in the GPS. Of course I could not use any address, because MIO weird syntax did not recognized any. Canadian address postal code uses 6 character, but actually it needs 7 spaces for proper syntax. MIO allowed only 4 characters. It was very time consuming to plan a route from address to address because of the poor database of given choices.
In the next test I tried to load about 100 waypoints from my eMap. I would keep this GPS if I could load and use my collection of waypoints. This was another fiasco. Load was quick. I selected waypoint and answer was: “The location is not on current map. Please download correct map”. There was no map to load and no way to verify that the coordinates were converted properly, because it does not show any information except the name of the waypoint. Extremely bad!
This was my last point and I decided to return the GPS back to the store. I found that even this is almost impossible to do. I had over 300 private addresses in the unit, but there was no way to delete them, not even one by one. The addresses were not in the SD card, but somewhere compiled in the operating system. The unit was connected to computer so I could sniff around trough the GPS directories, but I could not find my addresses. As I mentioned before, I am very computer literate, so I think I know what I was doing. I was ready to put this GPS into microwave, how desperate I was not to let my private addresses, phone numbers, bank account numbers…, to go to someone else. Because I had the original restore CD I tried to restore to default original state, but no way. The personal stuff was still there.
Finally I deleted the operating system, restored from CD and this was it. Nothing worked! It could not find maps…
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