Mio Navman M400

The basics

The Mio Navman M400 satnav wants to stamp out all those myths about pricey GPS units. It's a fully fledged, 4.3-inch PND with European maps that comes in under a hundred quid, but does it lose anything essential shaving off the cost?

The good

The price – for £99.99, the Mio Navman 400 offers European maps as standard and is a competent unit for this price. There's also extra-frills software such as picture tagging – you can take photos submitted by others from the Mio NavPix website, or anywhere else online, and stick them on your map. You can then match visual recognition with your location.

The bad

The build is somewhat mediocre – the windscreen clamp does not fold down, making it cumbersome to carry around. But the major letdown is the software and mapping layout. What good are all those tagged photos when the core direction features aren't up to scratch? We took the Mio Navman M400 for a spin around London town, and while it coped well with detours, but it also threw up congestion charge warnings non-stop, even at night, and even while you're trying to see which exit you should take on a roundabout. Speed cameras were another issue: yes, the Mio Navman M400 picked them all up, but it also showed cams on parallel roads, making things needlessly complicated. We much prefer TomTom's implementation, counting down the precise number of yards until the little yellow box.

The bottom line

If you're not planning on crossing the channel in your car, you might be better off opting for a cheaper TomTom One, but if you know you'll be driving in Europe, you'll find the included maps still make this a bargain.