A basic machine - at least mine is - the S505. Be careful if you want the European map version - its only available in the UK at Halfords, a point that Mio did not tell to my dealer prior to my purchase, leaving me with the UK and Ireland. However, due to this they did send me an activation for the euro maps, which was very kind of them.
The S505 is a competent machine if ill documented. It will not talk to your phone - or if it does, I have not found any way to connect it. The interface is not as simple as my previous TomTom navigator 5 at the moment, but it may become so with use. Examples - to find a filling station is no problem - just click the filling station button. They come up in abc order, and you have to tell the machine to list them in the obvious way - by distance. However, as my car runs on LPG, I dowloaded the LPG POIs from the net and installed them. No quick way to set a button for LPG stations - I have to do a word search under the find button. Then flick through the list of possibles and then select LPG stations, and up they come - in abc order. Select distance order and after a few moments, the nearest one is displayed. Why not do this first and save a lot of time?
Some screens have more content than the screen will display and there is no way of accessing this.
In addition, the screen is always in wide mode - not portrait, and the map displays lots opf info that is not really relevant to the journey. It also prattles on when there is no need to do so. If the route is straight on, why bother saying "straight for 4.6 miles". The English voice is not the best spoken that I have come across, and it is not much better than the system installed in my 728i from 2001 - all jerky and stilted, as if put together from different voices. The american ones are a little easier on the ear.
Route planning is a little vague. Locally, a 4 mile journey from my sisters to my house involves one main road and two minor ones. The S505 takes me off the main road and on to a narrow winding country road that I did not even know existed until now. Adds a couple of miles and about ten minutes to the drive.
It does receive traffic info, which impressed me greatly, as neither my Tom Tom nor my BMW does this. I tried it out on the M1 this weekend, and it took me on a route that diverted me off the motorway immediately, even though the blockage (at the time) was 27 miles ahead. We had a nice diversion before it dropped me back on the M1 smack in the middle of the blockage. Checking the instructions later to see what I had done wrong, I found that the divert button only appears on screen for 8 seconds, and I had set the Mio to avoid a blockage 20 miles ahead and it had done just that, ignoring the traffic information. So read the manual first when it is available and corrected.

Despite my adverse comments, the Mio S505 gives good guidance and a very clear display at a very reasonable price. (£179.99). Its voice is very audible at any speed in my BMW 728, though in a Renault, you may need to slow down. Entering street addresses is very easy, and you have the choice of an economic route as well as shortest, motorway, and no motorway. Entering a point on the map is not simple, involving zooming in and out and a very small map display. You can add POIs from the net, and it comes with free safety camera info for the first year and traffic for ever. So I will give it a chance and see how it goes. Once I get used to it, it will be as good as any other satnav - but different.
The alternative would be to buy a smartphone and add a Tom Tom 7 to it - not a cheap option, and who wants a map on a phone anyway. When it rings it would probably lose the loaction!

Howard Walker