Just released at Computex Taipei

Jun 6, 2008 16:16 GMT  ·  By

We were all pretty impressed by Mio's announcement regarding its PND Camera, but it would seem that the company's bag of goodies is far from empty. Thus, Mio has just announced yet another hybrid product, this time a member of the Moov family, which combines high-end navigation features with GSM and GPRS support, all of which are packed in a very small and lightweight form factor.

The people over at Mio tout the device to be the world's smallest connected PND, and they're quite right, at least to some extent. The device really has quite a slim form factor (129 mm x 78mm x 12.3mm) and weighs just around 164 grams, which means that users won't have any trouble carrying it around.

However, the true highlights of the new Moov 380 model are the built-in GSM and GPRS modules. Thus, the PND provides built-in SIM card support, designed to provide full phone features and GPRS connectivity. In this way, users can avoid any Bluetooth-synchronization issues altogether, as well as make phone calls, send SMSs and connect to the Web on the go.

If we take a good look at this thing's spec sheet, we can't help but notice that the differences from the rest of the Moov series are not exactly major. Thus, the Moov 380 is also built around a SiRF Star III GPS module with SiRFInstantFixII technology, relying on a Samsung 2443 (400Mhz) chipset for the various processing requirements.

Additionally, the device has been equipped with a 4.3-inch TFT LCD touchscreen panel (480 x 242 pixel resolution) and is powered by the same 720 mAh Li-Ion rechargeable battery found also in the other products from this family. It runs on a Win CE .Net 5 platform, uses the MioMap 2008 navigation software and even sports an intelligent route planning system, which allows users to plan routes with multiple waypoints and carry out route preview/simulation tasks.

The Mio Moov 380 will initially hit the shelves in Taiwan, over the course of June, but it will also arrive in the other regions of the world at some point over the third quarter of 2008.

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