 The GPS Project UNLOCK AND SHELL FOR MIO MOOV by Dalibor Lanik |
Mireo viaGPS 3.0 Black Edition This is Croatian navigation system and I must say that for such a small country they have made pretty good software. Ofcourse, I didn't want to critisize the choice of logo, but my good friend is a croat, and when I showed him the sw, his first reaction was "for pete's sake, they're overdoing this thing with checker field, are they? Can't they invent anything else than that?" Unimportant things aside, it's not bad. It has maps for all of europe, and it uses the same engine as MioMap 2008 (not to be confused with old MioMap 3, which was based on iGO) called "Cardinale".  The main menu is simple, though I wouldn't use classic "scroll" menu as the basic navigation menu. It is not that easy to find your way in text from the basic level. You shouldn't overdo it with icons either - but 1st level definitely has to have icons instead of text (i.e. Mio based on the same engine is much easier to use because it uses icons).  It is good that it has up/down arrows by default, so you don't have to wave your finger to scroll (like on Mio). As much as dragging the finger on screen to perform scroll looks cool, trust me, it is not very precise and is utterly impractical. There is an option to enable this on Mio, but you have to edit MioMap.ini file which most of the ordinary users simply won't find out unless they spend considerable amount of time reading the forums.  The main cockpit screen has everything you might want from basic functions, really good design. You can zoom in and zoom out and you can just hold the button it keeps zooming (you'll see with other software that doesn't do that how annoying it is). You can tilt image and turn it around. It is a bit slow, especially when there are a lot of objects on screen - which I noticed on Mio too, but Mio doesn't allow you to turn the image or tilt. There is a "record" button, volume button, and in status bar, a menu and route buttons. 
Pressing the middle of the screen brings tachometer. Pressing it again
brings sattelite fix view. Graphics is pretty much OK, even though I
don't like the division between land and sky that much - it looks the
same as on Mio, it's all blurred., but I guess this is a matter of
personal preference.      What is even more annoying than the main menu are the settings screens. Instead using standard checkboxes they use red ball and minus sign, so guessing what does what is kind of hard when you're not used to it.  Maps are OK (especially ex-Yugoslavia), but for some things they're just not precise enough, i.e. I tried searching for a street and it just couldn't find it, even though when I just browse, I see it labeled on a map. After several tries, I found that the street I'm searching is in the neighbouring city!! The city I searched is in the county named after the neighbouring city, but still this is great error - so according to Mireo, Vojvodjanska street in Crvenka, Serbia is actualy in Kula, Serbia. Also, it is sometimes failing miserably to connect destination when in different state, if you use separate maps for states (instead of one big "europe" map), i.e. it connects from Czech to Slovak, but failed to generate route from Czech to Serbia. So they need to work a bit on it. It could do with "road blocked" function, which I consider essential. On the bright side, it does have a "via" function (to specify you go to i.e. Budapest "through" (or via) Bratislava. The voices (at least the ones I tried) sound natural and are not annoying. One note though, that after testing in real life situations (navigating) program seemed a bit unstable, it managed to crush several times while I was in Montenegro and Croatia, but behaved well in Prague. What I like though, is that maps are compatible with MioMap, so if you keep both on an SD card, programs can share maps and building files. Verdict: Good simple nav program. Don't expect ultra advanced features or anything, but in the end it's simple clean interface and good graphics win. 5/10.
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