Mio Cyclo 300 review

The PC interface for the Cyclo isn’t great either. Although you can install a desktop app that’s stored on the Cyclo itself, it’s basically a front end for Internet Explorer that takes you to the MioShare web site. The web-based application itself relies on IE and ActiveX if you use Windows. A Mac equivalent is also available, but support for other browsers hasn’t been implemented. It takes ages to transfer even a handful of recorded journeys to MioShare, as it’s not just a matter of dumping the data to your PC – it has to be uploaded, too. If, like us, you make a lot of journeys before connecting the Cyclo to MioShare, you’ll have a long wait while all the data is transferred.

Whether uploaded or on the device, clicking into a journey’s entry – helpfully named by date and time – allows you to view your route in a Google Maps window, provides you with an elevation graph and data including your average and maximum speeds, total altitude gained and so on. While all this information is interesting, there’s not very much you can do with it and there are no options for exporting data to other services such as RunKeeper. You can’t even export a ride route as a track for future use.

You can use the MioShare interface to manually create tracks to follow, though, which you can then upload to your GPS unit to follow in future. The tracks mapping screen defaults to Mio’s Belgian homeland but leapt us to London as soon as we entered our post code. There are a few options you can use while plotting your route, including a manual planner that lets you place route nodes anywhere – handy if you want to go across country – and node-based planning, which finds the best road route between the nodes you place, although this didn’t always work, leaving us waiting indefinitely for the route to be mapped.

There are also two modes which instruct the track creator to automatically plot the best bike route to your destination, either including or not including unpaved pathways. This didn’t always work out as well as we might have hoped – like the Mio’s integrated route planner, the online version isn’t aware of important British cycle infrastructure such as the National Cycle Networks and for some unknown reason advised us to take a terrifying (and forbidden to cyclists) roundabout where the A1M crosses the M25. You can’t change the tracks mapped by these point-to-point features, either, which takes us back to node-based routing as the most practical option, given the planner’s minimal grasp of what a cycle path is, let alone where to find one.

Mio Share’s track creator at times comes up with routes that aren’t remotely suitable for cyclists

The Cyclo 300 is a great little dashboard and tracker but its ability to plot cycle-friendly routes is less than ideal. We also had issues with its accuracy in tracking our location relative to the next turn and we disliked the way it handles roundabouts. While occasional drop-outs in GPS accuracy as probably down the inherent problems of using GPS in a densely built-up city, the other issues can all be fixed by firmware updates. When and if they are, the Cyclo 300 will be a great riding companion, but for now its high-quality hardware is let down by the limitations of its firmware.

At £234, it’s also rather expensive given its limited range of features. There’s a more sophisticated version, the Cyclo 305, which includes heart rate monitoring and cadence sensing features, but we’d still recommend shelling out an extra £32 on the outstanding Garmin Edge 800 cycle GPS instead.