Mimio Interactive Xi

Overall Rating

Product Summary

The Good: Easy to install, portable, retrofit current whiteboards, low cost and the software uses the windows standard look and feel.

The Bad: Short battery life, ho-hum design kind of feels like a toy, clunky software design.

The Bottom Line: Overall this seems to be a good second choice to eBeam Edge.

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Mimio Interactive Xi Smartboard Review
Mimio Resources

Mimio On-line Tutorials

Mimio Quickstart Guide

Mimio Specifications


 Similar to Luidia’s eBeam Edge for Education the Mimio Interactive XI is a portable interactive whiteboard solution.  The Mimio Interactic Xi comes with a stylus that is a little bigger than a dry erase marker and a receiver that is 18 inches at full length and folds in half for easy transport and storage.

Set Up & Install

The install and set up is easy.   From start to finish it took us less than 10 minutes to get up and running.   We had our laptop connected to a projector facing the whiteboard.    Works with Windows, Mac and Linux OS systems.  The active area support 8ft x 4ft.   Here are the steps to install in a nutshell:

1. First we read through the Mimio Quickstart guide (2 minutes)
2. Installed the battery into the stylus
3. Attached the Mimio capture bar  to one side of the whiteboard and than plugged in the cord from the receiver to the USB port in our laptop.
4. Installed the Mimio software called Mimio Studio to our laptop

After installing the software and restarting the laptop the Mimio software instantly recognized the capture bar.   Following the wizard the software  asked to us to calibrate the system using the stylus to touch the calibration points projected on the whiteboard.

The set up is very simple.  The great thing about a portable interactive solution is that it can be used on a white board or an unused wall allowing us to leverage the resources we already have available.
Ease of Use

The Mimio solution is easy to use and responsive.  There are 5 buttons on the capture bar to access the tool palette, control the interactive mode, screen mark up and presentation mode. The stylus acts like a mouse for both left and right click.

We opened up a powerpoint presentation navigating through our file folder using the stylus.   The software has windows look and feel and gives you all the functionality to interact with your content including: navigation, annotations, text and highlighting to name a few of the tools.

Cool Features

1. Mimio Connect – This is a website powered by Mimio building a community for teachers providing a chockful of lesson plans and activities.  http://www.mimioconnect.com/

2. Recording – All the handwritten notes, mashups of digital images, annotations on powerpoint presentations are all recorded that can be used to replay a math problem during class or be shared as notes to be reviewed later.

3. Versatile & Portable – Along with the eBeam Edge for Education the Mimio solution is a portable solution offering all of the features and functions (and we believe more) of a traditional smartboard for less than half of the cost.

4. Warranty is 5 years.

Although we like the Mimio Interactive Xi bar, in our opinion it’s a good second choice to the eBeam Edge for Education.  Some of the main differentiations are as follows:

  • eBeam provides built in web sharing for remote teaching.
  • Better Quality of the look and feel of the eBeam Edge hardware
  • Mimio stylus had a shorter battery life.
  • eBeam has the industry’s largest active area, 9ft x 5ft
  • eBeam provides a 7 year warranty vs Mimo 5 year

Mimio Interactive Whiteboard Demonstration

SmartboardsReviews.com February 2010