Product Reviews

The prospect of being able to use your satnav as a portable video player is an enticing one. Rather than shelling out on a separate PMP such as the Archos 605 WiFi (reviewed in What's New, Shopper 239), you can use your TomTom's screen to watch videos when you're not using it for navigation.

TomTom devices don't have a video player, but Movies on TomTom installs one when you transfer your first video file. It doesn't match the style of TomTom's existing menus, though. Using the touch screen, you can easily drag the slider to any point in a video and increase or decrease

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volume.

You can use the software for converting videos for Navman, Navigon and Medion models, but this can be done using freeware applications. Only DVDs without copy protection can be converted. You can also choose DivX, WMV, Real and AVI files already on your hard disk as the source video. You can set the quality, resolution and size that you want for the resulting file, so you can fit it to the available space on your memory card.

While this all sounds great, the software felt unfinished and unreliable. We tried it under both Windows XP and Vista, where it refused to show a preview of our video and had an unreliable progress meter. Frustratingly, the resulting 'high-quality' video had a frame rate of 12fps, which was far from smooth when played on our TomTom One.

Video was squashed to fit on to the One's standard-aspect screen. We found no option to override this and so we had to endure unnatural-looking people onscreen. Another drawback is that satnavs such as the One have no headphone output.

Unfortunately, because Movies on TomTom doesn't actually let you watch your DVD movies on your TomTom, we simply cannot recommend it.