Labs

Medion's high-end navigation device is the most expensive in this Labs. It costs £10 more than the luxurious Sony and a whopping £64 more than the Labs-winning TomTom.

And you certainly get a lot for your money. We were impressed by the GoPal's wide-ranging feature set, which includes Bluetooth hands-free phone features, a safety-camera database and speech recognition. There's also a raft of less useful extras, including a fingerprint reader to lock and unlock the device.

Navigation

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is sensibly featured, too: you get text-to-speech (although it only reads out the numbers of major road names) and we really liked the look of the maps, which, based on Navteq data and the Navigon mapping engine, are clear and easy on the eye. Lane assistance is a boon at complicated motorway junctions.

But although the GoPal's voice instructions didn't miss a beat on our test route, elsewhere navigation wasn't quite perfect. The map update was far from smooth, and we noticed that the onscreen position lagged behind our position on the road by 10m or so, which could prove a problem in tight urban streets.

We felt the voice directions could have been louder, too. In noisy cabins, the top volume will struggle to be heard over shouting kids, road noise and a radio. And the interface felt sluggish when browsing the maps and moving from screen to screen during route planning.

Despite a wealth of features, the Medion's weaknesses in the key areas of navigation and usability ultimately put paid to its chances of an award this month. The high price merely cements that opinion.