When you first look at the P550 it looks pretty stylish, but on second inspection you notice a few design faults, for one it is a tad bulky compared to most PDA's especially as it weighs 170g and looks more like a product of yesteryear.

Secondly the SD card slot to the side is open which will invite a vacuum of dust to enter and thirdly there is a hand string hole at the top left corner which looks really tacky.

To the bottom of the P550 you will find the USB port and a set of buttons designed for turning on the product and switching the screen into landscape mode - useful for navigating - plus a tiny joypad, which is awkward to use.

Moving onto the positives the P550 does come with a lot of features for the price, as mentioned you get Wifi 802.11g support which is handy for accessing hotspots, Bluetooth for paring with mobile phones, a full car kit, an in-built SiRF-Star III chip for navigating and 92mb of free memory for storage.

Granted you are going to purchase a set of maps (as the P550 is void of any) but at £240 you do get some spare cash to invest in either TomTom maps or Mio's own Mio Map 3 software which we used for our road tests.

Performance wise the GPS option worked flawlessly and destinations were reached accurately, the Mio software is not as easy to use as the TomTom range but you do get all its features such as speed camera database (or safety camera database if we want to be politically correct) and TMC support for example.

Its 400mhz Samsung CPU ran most tasks such as watching videos and navigating ok but it is not up to handling more advanced games. Its screen quality due to the anti-glare coating gave it a rough texture and as a result it lacks the sharpness and quality of dedicated PDA's.

The battery is claimed to run for about 4-5 hours on GPS usage, but this will most likely be when the unit is run at half backlight, as increasing the light or doing any multimedia tasks drains the battery faster. Like most PDA's you can charge the unit via the USB cable which is handy when you want to use Activesync to install programs to your device.