Lab

Satnav devices

If you want to stay safe and reduce the chance of points on your license, you should keep your safety camera locations up to date. Most companies charge around £20 per year, but we've found that the most comprehensive and reliable database is available from www.pocketgpsworld.com. You can either pay £2 for one month's subscription to the site and at least one database download or £19 for a whole year and unlimited downloads.

Driving on your own in an unfamiliar place can be pretty stressful, but with the prices of sat navs dropping rapidly, some reliable guidance might be more within your reach than you think.

This month we've rounded up a mixture of dedicated and PDA-based models. Medion's GoPal 205 costs only £85 exc VAT, yet comes with safety camera locations preloaded. But if you want a device that can also synchronise with Outlook and can run extra applications, a PDA is the way to go.

Take HP's rx5720. It looks almost like a dedicated sat nav, but runs Windows Mobile 5, so you can also view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as standard, plus is capable of running thousands of other applications that are available for Windows Mobile. Like the Mio and Fujitsu Siemens, it also has integrated Wi-Fi, so you can connect to the Internet as well.

We've treated all nine as sat navs first and foremost, and our tests centre on how well each device got us from A to B rather than whether it was a good MP3 player or photo viewer as well. To find out how we separated the great from the merely good, read on.

There are plenty of other things you can do with a sat nav besides driving, and you'll find a selection of some serious and not so serious pursuits in this lab test. We also take a look into the future of GPS technology and what devices could look like and be used for in the next few years.

It's important to keep your maps up to date to ensure your sat nav can direct you reliably. We visited Teleatlas - one of the major digital mapping companies - to find out how the latest roads and layout changes are mapped.

Whatever your budget or needs, there's a sat nav to suit, so read on to find out which ones walk away with awards.