Hefting Mio’s 7-Inch GPS Giant

Mio's new S700 GPS offers a mammoth seven inch screen and a revamped interface for $300.

Seven inches is a lot of screen. This much is immediately obvious as you approach Mio’s booth on the CES show floor, where the S700 looks like a TV that accidentally got shuffled in with a bunch of GPS units. But make no mistake, this is a nav unit.

The goliath GPS crowns the top of Mio’s new S series, which was unveiled here in Las Vegas on Thursday, and though the seven-inch LCD is the main attraction, that’s not all that’s new. Mio has taken some cues from sibling company Navman (both owned by parent company Mitac) and completely reworked the interface too, producing a new way of navigating that places all the icons for different function on one scrollable main page, which it calls Spirit.

This unusual arrangement takes some getting used to. Dragging a fingernail seems to initiate scrolling, while finger taps results in a clicked icons. Fortunately, with seven inches of screen and only eight icons spread across it at a time, it’s nearly impossible to miss a button. If anything, the only annoyance resulted from a slight lag time that became pronounced on fast scrolls. Mio also ripped a page from Apple’s book with a dedicated home button that returns you to the main page from wherever you are – a definite winner.

Though its screens have swelled, Mio hasn’t given up on its typically budget pricing, either. The S700 will retail for only $300 when it hits store shelves in the second quarter of 2009.