Dang it! You lucky fellas!
I decided not to wait in line at Circuit City and just walked in when enough people made their way into the store.
(There must have been at least 1000 people in line!
) Biiig mistake! When I finally got into Circuit City I ran straight to the Auto section only to find that all of the Mios were sold out.
I was too late and the store was only open for about 10 minutes.
They said they had about 35 units and all sold in the first few minutes of the store opening. It just makes me sad to think of all the people that bought them and will never let them realize their full potential as Mini-HPCs.
Ah well. At least you guys will. You better get SpreadCE and TCPMP on those suckers ASAP
Dang... I wish I just ordered one online the night before Black Friday but I did not realize CC was letting you do that. Oh well. Oh, and my Staples said they only had 3 but I called about 10 other locations and I was quoted numbers from as high as 100 or 30 and as low as 2 -4!
It was not a total loss, though. I was pretty disappointed that I did not get a cheap Mio that I actually ended up buying another device instead. I remembered that Tweeter was selling some other WinCE based Navigation device for $179 after rebates. Sure its $30 more, but its still a decent deal especially since it seems to be a bit better than the Mio in some ways.
(Its also worse in ways I will get to later.
) It was pretty late
(6 PM
) to have any chance of getting a BF item like that but I decided that I would call them just for the heck of it. Well, it must have been my lucky day because they had one machine left
(a return
) and were willing to hold it for for $20 minutes! So, I rushed over to purchase my new WinCE H/PCish GPS thing and the rest is history!
When I had a closer look at this thing, I was pleasently suprised by its specs! It has a beautiful high resolution TFT screen
(480x272
)vs the 320x240 Mio, a very fast 472mhz ARM processor, and 64MB of RAM! Along with that, it has the strangest, most generic model name I have heard in a long time. Its called the "SupportPlus inVion 4 inch with buttons" See
http://www.supportplususa.com and
http://www.invionnavi.com
As its name implies...this thing is no Mitac Mio...
It does have some cons compared to the Mio or any other H/PC for that matter. For one, it comes with Alturion GPS as its Navigation app.
(Yeah, I never heard of it either and thats the point
) Its obviously not going to be as good as the Mio's IGO 2006 but its not that big of a deal on a WinCE machine because there are so many other Navigation apps out there that will work..they just cost money. It also has a kind of crappy button layout if you want to play games...but then the Mio's is actually worse. The real disappointment with this thing was the OS itself. For some odd reason, it can't Suspend and when you power it off, all contents of the object store are lost! Including the REGISTRY! There is just no excuse for that! It can't even soft reset despite having hardware that would indicate otherwise. When you press the reset hole, it just cuts power off! There is no difference between the power button and reset button that I can see. Choosing suspend from the Start Menu does the same. ;
( I honestly think this thing is capable of working like an H/PC or Pocket PC...but for some odd reason the ROM/bootloader it ships with does not allow it. Thankfully, after spending days reading the French gpspassion.com forums via an online translator, I discovered that there is a ROM update to at least allow the registry to persist. The object store is still lost...but with a persistent registry, that would not be so bad. But it still sucks that it does not have Suspend or even screen off.
I'll try to get some photos and screenshots later in the week for you guys and perhaps post how to fix its issues for anyone else that has one of these things.
Enjoy your Mios... :|
