Mio’s world market positions in the PDA phone market segment won’t appear too impressive if we have a look at the real leaders like HTC, but anyway the Mio guys manage to leave the second league players like E-TEN far behind. The annual turnover of the latter makes up some 160,000 copies of PDA phones which is rather a modest achievement, while Mio sold about 3,400 000 phones by the end of the first half year of 2007, 25% of them being PDA phones. Thus Mio was five times as successful as E-TEN, we hope that gives you a pretty clear picture of the company’s real power on the world market. This number is based on the sales volume of just two models of PDA phones – A700 and A701, both based off the same platform. Since recently, the two have been accompanied by the new A501 and A702. Mio’s projected sales for 2008 are estimated around 8,600,000 phones which is a very good result for the navigation device market. If we compare the numbers to those of the past years, that becomes quite clear: in 2004 Mio sold 300,000 phones, in 2005 – 855,000, in 2006 – 1,400,000.

Considering the latest developments in the market segment, Mio stands next to ASUS in the chase after HTC, the ultimate leader. The main advantage exploited by Mio in their new product is the GPS support which has had a long history of successful implementation in earlier products of the company. The navigation part of the phone will be thoroughly reviewed below. What goes to the comparison with P526, it’s not only the form factor which is common to the both models, but as well a number of technical specifications including CPU, RAM, extension slot… The Mio solution enjoys a better variety of features like camera, Wi-Fi, ROM and so on, at the same time having a higher price. Being close rivals, the two require a detailed investigation and comparison for their strong and weak sides to be revealed. Let’s see why there was so much hype about the Mio release while A501 hit the shelf almost unnoticed. A702 is the flagship of Mio’s current portfolio despite of its disproportionately low price. The device is remarkable for its quality camera (3 Mpix, auto-focusing) and extensive wireless protocol support (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS). Secondary features like 3G support or VGA screen weren’t implemented to boost the obvious advantages by giving the appealing solution an even appealing price, leaving the usual hype business to the most devote followers of that strategy, namely E-Ten and other B-class vendors. The decision resulted in a top-class PDA phone with a very reasonable price. Might look like a promising product but let’s get down to the facts before drawing any conclusions.

Mio A702 Main Specs

Communications:	GSM 850/900/1800/1900, GPRS/EDGE
Operating System:	Windows Mobile 6 Professional
CPU	TI OMAP 850, 200 Mhz
Memory:	1 Gb ROM, 64 Mb RAM micro SD extension slot, no card in the sales package
Display:	touchscreen, 2,7”, QVGA (240х320), 65K
Wireless protocols:	USB1.1, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, A2DP and Wi-Fi supported
Camera:	3.2 Mpix (up to 2592 x 1944), auto-focusing
Battery:	capacity - 1130 mAh Up to 240 minutes of talktime Up to 200 hours of standby
GPS:	+
Keypad:	numeric
FM tuner:	-
Dimensions:	110 x 57.5 x 16.5 mm
Weight:	148 g
Recommended price:	€500

Mio is going to replace the A701 model with the new A702, offering the novelty to businessmen often engaged in business trips. The price was defined considering the A701 models, it’s a bit lower now. The target audience are people aged around 30 or 40, again lower the target age of A701’s audience. The primary selling points of A702 include, as stated by the manufacturer:

We wouldn’t agree on the ‘fast CPU’ point though, 200 Mhz being a rather moderate value as well as on the points concerning the integrated antenna and WM6 because the two features are found virtually in any device of that class. The 4-band GSM module doesn’t sound like a serious advantage either. Although that’s just a subjective point of view presented by Mio themselves, mainly concerning the marketing aspects of A702, so now it’s time to analyze the facts from a more practical point of view…

Bundling

The sales package includes all accessories typically bundled with a PDA phone save for one very peculiar addition. The A702 comes with a special car cradle for improving the quality of GPS signal while in a car. The rest of accessories includes an USB cable, a wire stereo headset, a battery, a manual, a software disk and a charger suitable for a car cigarette lighter.

Design and ergonomics

The form factor of Mio A702 closely follows the design of ASUS P526. The latter also utilizes joystick-free design solution unlike the similarly looking P525. It’s a bit unclear why should the have removed this element considering that there’s plenty of room for joystick below the screen – the keypad is located almost at the very bottom of the front panel as you can see from the pictures. Such a solution is neither good for ergonomics nor logically explicable. The lack is partially compensated by the scrolling wheel on the left edge of the casing, but this control element has no side positions. Another nuance of the model is connected with scrolling – the lack of a separate two-position button for sound volume adjustment is not fully compensated by the scrolling wheel since the corresponding function is not always available.

Let’s have a look at another key feature of the device, namely the keypad. In Mio A702, the keypad has a disputable design – the buttons are placed at big angles and aren’t as easy to handle as one might desire. A better segmentation wouldn’t be bad as well – the buttons are crowded which looks silly while there’s a plenty of free place around the keypad. We can’t say the keypad is a sheer failure, the buttons are still easy to push and the backlighting looks superb.

The keypad of ASUS P526 looks better in comparison with the keypad of A702, but the difference is not critical. Besides the Mio device has no problems with T9 text input. An exclusive MioKeyboard application also contributes to a more easy way of typing. The PDA phone is slightly heavier and bigger than P526 – mainly due to the enhanced auto-focusing camera module and the Wi-Fi chip. Though this causes no inconvenience, the thing sits in hand quite comfortably.

The overall design looks rather appealing, the stylish leatherlike texture of the back panel inspires a fashionable feel. Well we didn’t say it was actual leather – no more than texturized plastic. The piece resembles analogous materials found in Samsung G800 but a bit harder than in Nokia E650 – more practical and less nice to touch. The casing of A702 is completely made of plastic, making use of no exotic materials like metal or glass. The plastic quality is high as well as the build quality – only subtle screeching can be heard when you squeeze the phone, and there’s virtually no backlash. After a month of testing in many kinds of environments (we were able to get hold of the novelty long before the official release) the coating didn’t degrade or deform at all. It’s a nice point, especially if we recall E-TEN products utilizing cheap materials of insufficiently low quality for their respective market classes. We suggest comparing the M700 model with the A702 and the difference will instantly surface. You won’t have a hard time telling which company cares for the material quality.

Let’s compare the appearance of ASUS P526 and Mio A702:

Let’s compare Sony Ericsson P1i and Mio A702:

Let’s compare Nokia N95 and Mio A702:

The design aspect of A702 has been already briefly discussed in this article so let’s come back to it in a more detailed way. The back panel of the casing hosts a flashlight-supplied camera yet without a protective cover. The main speaker is also found nearby, apparently not being a reasonable solution because that causes the sound signals to muffle if you put the device on the table with its screen up (like most people do). The issue isn’t as troubling as in the case of SonyEricsson K850i but yet unpleasant. The battery cover as well as the battery itself aren’t merged together so no problems here at all.

The upper part of device hosts the extended aerial socket and the stylus holder as well, which looks rather reasonable. The above-mentioned scrolling wheel is located on the left edge - a good support for lovers of e-books, the interface slot (of the universal miniUSB type) is found just nearby along with the reset socket. The right edge hosts the power, GPS and camera controls (the camera button is two-positioned like with most auto-focusing cameras) and the memory extension slot (microSD), protected with a cover and the headset jack (universal 2,5 mm). The bottom edge has no controls.

Communications

Mio A702 is designed for operating in GSM 850/900/1800/1900 network, supports GPRS/EDGE. The wire communication protocol is USB 1.1 only, unfortunately the manufacturer seems to have saved a bit of production cost here as well and gave us no support for USB 2.0 which results in a correspondingly low performance. Without the Mass Storage support (a disappointing difference with ASUS P526 which supports that mode) this doesn’t make a critical point though.

Wireless protocols supported by A702 are Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR and Wi-Fi. The latter sports a particularly fine implementation – the system was able to achieve a stable connection even when the signal was threateningly weak. This is one of the best Wi-Fi solutions we have ever seen on the market. The situation doesn’t seem just as fine when it comes to utilizing a Bluetooth headset – once we turned on A2DP the device seemed to lack performance, all the tasks went laggy as well as the sound did. We hope this will be fixed by the time the device enters the market. The following profiles are supported:

Bluetooth synchronization is supported, for that you’d require:

. Configure “Windows Mobile Device Centre” application or ActiveSync on your PC.
. In Windows Mobile, Start > Applications > ActiveSync.
. Activate Bluetooth both on the phone and PC sides, engage the visible mode
. In Windows Mobile, Menu > Connection - Bluetooth.
. On the first run you’ll also have to run the Bluetooth Configuration Wizard.

You can’t use this function with Wi-Fi due to security reasons, however it was used in earlier versions of AKU (until 2.0).

The A702 enjoys a brilliant GPS implementation, this hardware element being traditionally based off the SiRF star III chipset. In a clear afternoon the device was able to detect eight satellites beating all the competitors’ solutions – only six were detected by an ASUS P526 laying nearby. The geographical software and data – Mio Map (3.3) is included as a part of the package, another important point of difference with P526 which would require buying something like iGO adding another hundred euros to the overall cost.

A number of GPS utilities comes along with Mio Map. Emergency Locator allows for an emergency message with your current coordinates to be sent to number(s) specified in advance. Mio SMS Locator tells you the coordinates of the sender whenever you get an SMS and calculate a route to that person. GPS Quick positioning servers for satellite coordinate acquisition via GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi or Active Sync.

Some people may find the lack of an FM tuner extremely disappointing though likely it was considered an obsolete feature for this class of devices by the manufacturer and thus dropped for lower production costs.

Memory

Please don’t be thinking we made a mistake in the specifications tab – the A702 model actually has a whole gigabyte of RAM unlike the mere 128 Mb that the P526 has at disposal. This outstanding memory size allows for map data being stored right in the phone memory with no need to use a memory extension card. The latter nevertheless is in its right place, a typical microSD slot with full hot-swap support. There’s no memory card bundled with the device, and the officially announced card capacity maximum is 4 Gb, HCSD is supported. The RAM size is quite typical for a recently released Windows Mobile solution – namely 64 Mb.

Display

The device utilizes a screen built based off the TFT technology that has a diagonal of 2,7’’, sports a QVGA resolution of 320x240 and can display up to 262K colors. The image quality is above average though is slightly inferior to that of ASUS P526 at the same time due to a worse brightness and view angles specifications, though the difference is negligible. The info on the screen is easily legible in the direct sunlight.

In broad daylight, as compared to HTC TyTN II:

The interface design is typical for a device based off the Windows Mobile software platform. The status line is found at the top of the screen, indicating the quality of signal, the battery charge level, the time as well as availability of wireless protocols including WiFi, Bluetooth, GPRS/EDGE, 3G, and also there’s the tasklist. The bottom line contains context button labels.

The main part of the desktop can be varied to your liking. By default it shows current day, the service provider info, the owner personal data, messaging stats, the tasklist and schedule, and the indicator area (battery charge, display angle, wireles module manager and backlighting level). The user can customize the order in which these fields follow or remove some of them from the screen completely. The Today Desktop can feature a custom picture or a photo for a background. In addition, quick lists are available. They can be customized by the user and serve for launching applications right from the Today Desktop. The status line is also found here – battery level, screen aspect switch, memory and so on.

There are two kinds of menus in this phone: the quick access menu and the main menu. The former is activated on pressing the Start button and essentially is a vertical list that contains 7 items, info about the 5 recently launched applications as well as grants access to the main menu and settings. The main menu is a list of applications very much similar to a regular Windows-styled window with icons and application names below them. A maximum of 12 icons per screen is allowed.Mio Menu is the trademark application launcher.

Mio A702 sports the following set of preinstalled applications:

          System Tab
About, Backlight, Cell Broadcast, Certificates, Clock & Alarms, Customer Feedback, Encryption, Error Reporting, eUtility, Flashlight, GPS settings, Memory, Power, Quick GPS Position, Regional settings, Remove programs Screen, Smart Quit, Windows Update.

          Connections Tab
Beam, Bluetooth, Connections, USB to PC, Wi-Fi, Wireless Manager

The Phone application can be activated either by pressing the Call Button or by activating the corresponding menu item in the Start menu. The main screen of the Phone application hosts three tabs - Calls, Quick Dial and Phone Settings.

Mio A72 stores contacts within the Contacts application. The SIM-card stored contacts share the same list with the user-memory stored contacts. A SIM-stored contact can be transferred to user memory and vice versa. The PDA phone supports three types of contacts:

Only one telephone number is allowed per USIM/SIM-card stored contact. If you copy a user memory contact to SIM/USIM, the SIM Card Manager program splits any multiple phone numbers associated with a single contact into separate contact records for the USIM/SIM card memory. A special suffix is added automatically to the names of such duplicate contacts to tell between them (by default "/M" stands for Mobile, "/W" for Work and "/H" for Home)...

To make a phone call, you can equally use the Phone application, the Contacts book, the Quick Dial or the Calls menu as well as the SIM card manager. Traditionally there's support for Smart Dialing which makes dialing easier than before. Once you input the initial symbols of the phone number or the person's name, the phone filters all the contacts automatically to fit the search criteria. This sorting works automatically for contacts stored both in user memory and on the SIM card and is applicable to the contacts book and the call log. This saves a bit of time while searching for some person's name in the phonebook.

By default, the call log displays information about all calls but it's customizable to filter missed, outgoing and incoming calls only, sorting by name is also present. Besides the name and the number each record in the log stores the time, the date and the call length.

The only limit to the size of the contact book is the amount of free user memory. Up to 12 phone numbers of different types of phone numbers, 3 e-mail addresses, home and work address, web page address and a plenty of other details like Assistant's Phone Number can be associated with every contact. It's needless to say that each contact can enjoy its own ringtone and picture as well as belong to one of the customizable user groups.

Let’s note another nice addition to the device’s functionality – blacklisting. The Mio Blacklist application allows blocking not only undesired calls but messages as well. The application interface is simple to the limit – you only have to select the undesirable contacts from your contact book and move them to the blacklist.

Another trademark software that comes with Mio A702 is called Contact Guard. It allows to hide messages, call log and personal details from anyone who might try to peek into your phone.

Traditionally the Messaging application is used for composing, viewing and sending SMS and MMS messages as well as e-mail messages. Once you get a new message, the Today screen displays a special reminder symbol. You can sort your messages in a number of ways, for example you can sort your e-mail messages by topic.

An incoming message is indicated with a pop-up window despite of the menu the user is currently in. It can be instantly opened, set for deletion or just skipped. The messages are automatically organized in a tree structure that is very comfortable for browsing through. The MioKeyboard comes in handy for composing messages, as it was discussed above.

E-mail can be set to be delivered automatically where you specify the interval before each message is received or sent automatically. Sorting by date is possible. You can activate simultaneous sending and recieving of mail, set a mailing schedule to spend less money by sending the mail when the GPRS traffic is the cheapest and sort incoming messages by size prior to downloading them to the phone.

If you use a Microsoft Exchange 2007 server the message will be delivered instantly and not on the next synchronization. Full HTML support is present. If the message contains several attachments, all of them are downloaded, but you can activate delayed downloading mode. You can use hot key combinations for quick access to the messaging functions like Reply, Forward, etc.

An able security system is in its place. Any outgoing message can be digitally signed and encrypted automatically prior to sending, an IRM (Information Rights Management) capability allows you to limit access to messages in the way you like.

RSS enjoys a full support, the corresponding application is easy to use and requires minimal efforts for getting latest news. It’s not necessary to keep track of your own channels, the phone will download a ready database on its own. The only bad point here is that there’s no RSS availability indicator in the browser, while such a simple function is observed with many other models with UIQ smartphones, e.g. Sony Ericsson P1i.

PIM

The Calendar application is used for planning events and meetings, this day's schedule can be displayed on the Home screen. If your PC has a copy of Outlook installed on it, you can synchronize the schedules. Reminders can be set in the form of sound signals or screen flickers.

The Calendar can also be used for arranging meetings via e-mail with the users of Outlook or Outlook Mobile. If the recipient accepts the proposition, the meeting is automatically added to their schedule. When the person affirms to participate, your schedule is automatically updated with an acknowledgement. The Windows Mobile platform has long been known for its strong points in the corporate sphere, so we observe the same once again in HTC TyTN II.

The standard vCalendar file format is supported for exchanging information about scheduled events, the corresponding files can be exported to the PC version of Outlook.

The Tasks application is used for scheduling events which can either be set to be one-time or recurring. You can set up reminders and sort them by categories. There's a tasklist which automatically highlights in red expired tasks. You can set a reminder that will be automatically activated on every occasion when open your schedule to add a new event.

The Notebook helps you to store quick notes. You can input the text from the keyboard, put it down in handwriting or use voice-to-text processing as well as convert handwritten notes into digital text or send your notes to other people. If a letter traverses more than three marking lines, it's processed as an image, otherwise - as text. To select an image for further removal or copying just hold you stylus pressed to the screen where the image is for a few moments.

Office Mobile comprises three applications used to view and edit Microsoft Office documents - Word Mobile (viewing and editing of *.doc, *.rtf, *.txt and *.dot files), Excel Mobile (viewing and editing of *.xls files), PowerPoint Mobile (playing *.ppt and *.pps files) The traditional PDF-viewer Adober Reader LE is used to view *.pdf files, including those protected by a password with maximum key length of 128 bit.

Explorer is a basic file manager that serves for browsing media folders. Also a .zip archiver is included as well. A back-up functionality is provided by the Sprite Backup software.

MioCalc – combines a measures converter and a calculator within a nice and easy to use interface.

World Time – is, quite predictably a world clock application with a number of selectable interface themes.

Multimedia

Mio A702 is compatible with the following graphic file formats: *.bmp, *.jpg, *.gif, *.png. A simple Photo Manager is preinstalled to help the user make simple changes to the files, like rotation or trimming.

It does better at handling audio and video files:

Media file format	Format extension	Audio file format	Audio format extension
Windows Media Video	.wmv, .asf	Windows Media Audio	.wma
MPEG4	.mp4	MP3	.mp3
H.263	.3gp, .3g2	MIDI	.mid
H.264	.mp4, .3gp, .3g2, .m4v	AMR, narrowband	.amr
Motion JPEG	.avi	AMR, wideband AAC	.awb,.m4a

The selected media file can be sent by e-mail, transferred to another devices, played as a slide show, sent to a person through the Windows Live MySpace network and so on.

The preinstalled Windows Media Player Mobile allows for executing video and audio records, both local and networks playback is possible. The three main display windows are:

The integrated voice recorder quite expectedly allows recording of voice with an opportunity to send the record via MMS or e-mail at once as well as to transfer them via a wireless connection or use as ringtones. The records are stored in the AMR-NB format. (Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband).

Camera

Camera is one of the key features of Mio A702, the model comes supplied with a powerful camera making a good match for a camera phone from the previous generation – Nokia N73, Sony Ericsson K790i or Samsung D900, which is an astounding result for a PDA phone. Such a solution is a novelty to the Mio company, however was earlier implemented by HTC (Advantage X7500 and TyTN II models). The A702 model occupies a unique market position because of such an unmatched feature, the closest comparable P525 model utilizing a 2 Mpix camera and P526 having no auto-focus capability at all.

As we have mentioned earlier, there’s no protective camera cover in Mio A702, so we guess you’d better be careful when using it – the grease on the lens significantly degrades the photo quality. The image acquisition is landscape-oriented, a large touchscreen is used for camera controls and adjustment. The control button is two-positioned. Different points of the perspective are used for defining the optimal exposure. The camera is able to take pictures at resolutions up to of 2048x1536 and shoot video at resolutions up to 176x144. A 4x digital zoom is available, however it proves of little use – the effect is comparable to the analogous procedure in an image editing program.

Almost all the necessary settings are included, yet with some exceptions. For example, an auto ISO adjustment option is missing, no photo frames and so on, and only two effects are available – Sepia and Mono. An interesting GPS Stamp function is available – in fact it’s a user POI with a corresponding photo. The rest of the setting is typical. The interface is not the most comfortable ever seen, but it can hardly be called confusing either. After a short learning curve you are sure to get to know all of its peculiarities. Namecard recognition capability comes in handy (Western Europe, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong)

Here’s an example of a camera shot made with Mio A702:

The camera photo quality of Mio A702 is good however a bit lower than that of TyTN II. In comparison with P526 the Mio PDA phone looks like a winner but you shouldn’t expect it to beat Nokia N73, Sony Ericsson K790i or Samsung D900, the device can barely match Samsung E590. The important thing however is that even such a relatively mediocre photo quality is uniquely high for a PDA phone from this price bracket, making A702 the best camera-supplied device of its class. But the video quality isn’t much to boast about – both quality and resolution leave much to be desired.

Performance

The hardware platform of Mio A702 is based on the TI OMAP 850 CPU operating at a frequency of 200 MHz. In these days, it’s the minimal value decent for a PDA phone, so don’t expect it to make any world records. There’s no preinstalled Java manager either. We hope this issue will be fixed in the commercial version of the device. Let’s have a quick comparison with ASUS P256 which ironically happens to utilize the same model of CPU:

Spb Benchmark

Model	Mio A702	ASUS P526
CPU index	984.8	839.08
File system index	121.32	101.41
Graphics index	515.27	4099.06
ActiveSync index	5011.26	3755.24
Spb Benchmark index	268.87	243.05

As we see, the two devices displayed comparable result in Spb Benchmark, but the intermediate values differ in a number of ways – Mio does better with the ActiveSync Index while ASUS is good at Graphix Index. On the whole, again, the two display roughly equal, low performance. It’s especially easily seen against the background of top products by other brands.

There many people trying to put HTC TyTN II and E-TEN gloofish on the same shelf despite of the obvious difference in stuff and appearance. Nevertheless the both are flagship models of their respective product lines. Let’s quote some test results scored by the top models, adding to the list Gigabyte GSmart i350 as well:
Spb Benchmark

Model	HTC TyTN II (Kaiser)	Gigabyte GSmart i350	E-TEN glofiish X800
CPU index	1581.9	1898.53	1012.08
File system index	175.71	449.69	128.75
Graphics index	3493.66	4165.2	236.04
ActiveSync index	5195.78	11158.59	2404.66
Spb Benchmark index	421.69	918.78	256.18

As we see, both A702 and P526 have CPUs insufficiently weak for their flagship status, so neither does good at solving complicated tasks. But the X800 was the biggest disappointment – it’s hard to understand why it does so badly with a 500 Mhz CPU. We tried running the test for a few times, guessing at first that there was some error or inaccuracy in the calculations, but the results always were the same – comparing it a similar VGA-supplied i350 model, the results look rather pessimistic. We’d suggest E-TEN issuing a patch or two similar to X500 patches which once were released in abundance for that particular model. Unfortunately E-TEN seem to be unable to release bug-free devices that wouldn’t need patching.