This is not a Sat Nav – but it always knows exactly where you are – it comes with a lifetimes updates for safety cameras – which sounds better than speed cameras – and gives an exact view of what happened should you ever have a crash it even captures audio.
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There are three parts, the camera unit, the windscreen sucker which forms the rear of the unit and a cable to go to your cars cigar lighter and this should fit into the back of the unit near the sucker. On the face of it attach the cable through the windscreen sucker part and click into the camera. I will not bore you with the problems I had and it seems I am not alone as the product manager for Mio made a video which explains things and once I had watched this short video a few times I worked out how to connect the sucker part and the cable and after that it was easy. It’s just a shame that the Quick Start Guide does not have this information.
The camera and screen are 9x5x3cm, the sucker fitment increases the middle figure to around 10cm and this is the amount it will stick out beside the driver’s internal mirror, the mini USB to cigar lighter plug cable is around 3.2metres long and this you would route around the top and side of the windscreen to wherever your cigar lighter is.
Its basic job is to look forward from beside the drivers mirror, it is constantly recording to any Micro SD Card you insert, it records in chunks so it always has the latest incidents – if any – once the card is full it would delete the oldest chunk.
It can do other things and looking at one of the foreign Mio sites – it’s not yet on the UK one – I see there is an optional tyre pressure sensor so it can detect a slow puncture.
On my first test I was the passenger as I find that an easy way to see what the unit can do without being distracted from the task of driving, it can display what it is seeing and this might be useful for initial setup but after that surely a no no. It displays your speed and of course shows when ‘safety cameras’ are coming up.
It has four different screen capture resolutions the highest of which is probably higher than a standard 1920x1080 computer panel can show.
While the unit has a small internal battery this can only be recharged from the cars cigar lighter socket so the initial setup needs to be done in situ.
I have one gripe it knows where you are down to a metre or so why is clock one hour wrong during BST as it stays by default on GMT.
The menus allow lots of choices to be made many of which are probably not relevant to most, I suspect that most will want the unit as a witness and as such they want to install it and forget about it until the accident happens. As it says on the box ‘Dash cam – your eyewitness on the road’
I was impressed with the images it got even on a less than clean windscreen as dependant on your windscreen wipers sweep the area just beside the drivers internal mirror is not always the cleanest area of the screen. Night-time on urban roads also gave good images. So those with dual wipers might have to find another placement area as that centre top area does not always get wiped.
As an example of video length and size when I reduced the video capture to 1920x1080 a 30 minute journey was broken into twelve separate videos of around 260MB each.
The Mio MiVue 658 is available from Amazon for, at the time of publication, £153.99 with free delivery.
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