Mio Announces New Portable GPS System

Mio 269 offers up a 2.5GB hard drive, touch sensitive color LCD, built-in street level maps and MP3 player capability.

Mio Technology, a San Francisco Bay Area based company which markets GPS products under its DigiWalker brand, introduced a new family member today as part of a worldwide roll out. The Mio 269, priced at $799, offers a 2.5GB hard drive which comes pre-loaded with detailed maps of the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii and Canada.

The Mio 269 sports itself in a compact case (5 ½” x 3 x 1”) with a touch sensitive 3.5-inch color LCD and integrated GPS antenna. It’s powered by an Intel 300 MHz CPU and offers 32MB of flash ROM and 64MB of SDRAM for its Windows CE based operating system.

This particular GPS device, according to Mio’s press release, is loaded with a lot of cool features. It comes loaded with over a million points of interest for easy mapping to, including airports, ATMs, lodging and more. The voice guided directions complement on screen displays which appear in landscape mode and in 2D or 3D views.

Like a growing number of other aftermarket GPS devices with large hard drives, the Mio 269 also doubles as a MP3 player. The hard drive provides half a gigabyte of space for music files and an internal SD/MMC card slot is available to expand the memory availability. MP3 playback software is included and playlists and songs can be transferred to the player via the USB port.

More information on the Mio 269 can be found on the product’s website.