I've never been a great consumer of gadgets, which may seem strange for someone who makes his living through technology, but ever since I bought my first 5¼" disc drive for about £500 in 1980-something it rapidly became apparent that new technology represents a very poor investment. Moore's Law drives development that ensures today's hot gadget is tomorrow's car boot left over. Couple this with a suspicion that buying something like a tomtom sat nav would deprive my brain of vital exercise means that I have only just invested in a such a device, although coming late to the party does mean that my purchase has a few more bells and whistles than it might have done a year or two ago, and is also a lot cheaper. Read on for a personal view of the tomtom 730T SatNav.

The Tomtom 730 Traffic does all the usual things, and as you might expect from Tomtom does them pretty well. The bell (or is it a whistle?) that I particularly like is the traffic information integration. This takes the form of a sidebar which appears whenever you have the external traffic data receiver connected. This represents your route as a straight line overlaid with any delays in your way. The data is gathered from the Trafficmaster system via a small receiver and ariel attached to the windscreen. If the system detects a delay of more than a few minutes it will ask you if you want to re-route by offering two buttons on the touch screen (one for yes and the other for no, easy really). Every time I've needed to use this feature the system has reduced traffic delays of 10 to 15 minutes down to a minute or two, getting me back on schedule. So gone are the days of tuning to a local radio station in the forlorn hope that you'll get traffic news that is a) current and b) that you can do anything about without pulling over and spending another ten minutes studying a map (assuming you have a suitably detailed one with you).

Tomtom have a system where if you dock your "Go" to am internet connected pc it will, if you let it, upload (anonymously we are told) historical information about your journeys. I presume this means it compares how long it thought the journey was going to take with how long it actually took. This data is aggregated with that collected from  other Tomtom users and added to the map updates which you are invited to download to your device when you dock. As a result of this real life data ,and the "IQ Routes" technology that makes use of it, journey time predictions are uncannily accurate - so now you know you're going to be late the moment you set off!

What isn't precisely quantifiable is the social benefit these devices bring, my own experience is one of reduced driving stress and reduced mileage and fuel consumption due to better routes and fewer jams. Tomtom present research on their website that suggests I am not alone, and also that using a satnav increases road safety  Unlike things such as mobile phones, mp3 players, games consoles etc (all great technology and useful in the right place and time but all with negative social impacts in my view), I can see no down side to using a satnav - except possibly the brain exercise part.

Things that aren't so good!  

Before you think I've gone totally overboard on this device I thought I'd list some of the 730T's less impressive features - just for balance.

Voice recognition 

The tomtom 730T has voice recognition so that you can, when entering locations, speak to it. However don't think you can be driving along and ask it to change your destination, you still need to get into the menu system and press buttons so hands are required. The speech recognition saves some typing when entering city and street names, but only works on English place names on mine. This is not to be confused with the text to speech functionality that reads out road names and numbers, this worked fine and is really useful, although pronunciation of place names was often amusing.

Media functions

The 730T has some rudimentary media functions, an MP3 player and an image gallery. These are ok for occasional use but if you want serious mobile media look elsewhere. There is an fm transmitter that will pipe the tomtom's audio into your car radio, but in practice requires a clear frequency to operate on and this will vary as you move around. In the end you don't bother as the device's internal speaker is more than adequate for the navigation functions.

Battery Life 

I can only get two or three hours on a full charge out of my 730T so it really needs to be hooked up to your cigar lighter socket.(Does anybody actually use their cigar lighter socket for lighting cigars?)

Mounting bracket

The mounting bracket (with a sucker to stick it to your windscreen) is adequate but an earlier model I have used had a much more robust bracket with the connector built in. With the 730T you have to connect the mini usb (power) and the traffic data receiver (mini jack) before you clip it into the bracket - a bit fiddly.

All in all, a great little device which I am sure will have paid for itself in saved fuel and time before the next wave of technology consigns it to the car boot sale. 

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