Be careful it doesn't direct you down very narrow roads to save 30 seconds off the journey. I find this the biggest fault of Sat Nav's.

In my experience they tend to be OK in the conurbations though my wife did get taken down a farm track to cut off a corner off a major road on her way to a training course in Winsford once. Where they are not so good in my experience is in rural areas.

Earlier in the year we were on holiday in Pembrokeshire and some of the routes the Sat Nav took us on were just plain idiotic. Based on that experience I bought a new road atlas for our recent holiday to Cornwall so I could check what the sat nav was coming up with. It turned out to be a wise move and I am sure sticking to the more obvious routes you could see on the map saved a lot of reversing and hairy passing maneuvers down narroe Cornish lanes. I still used the Sat Nav but when the next direction was to turn down an unnamed road I just ignored it and this seemed to work well.

One way around idiotic sat nav routes is to use itinerary planning if your sat nav supports it. Most if not all current Tom Tom sat navs [idon't[/i support it. They used to. My original Tom Tom One had it but the latest one I have does not. Some of the Garmin ones do and if yours does there is a bit of free software out there you can use with it called Tyre from here: www.tyretotravel.com/

The idea is you set multiple waypoints based on a Google Map route. This is not the same as "travel via" as that could still take you down an unwanted short cut. So using waypoints you get to tell the sat nav exactly which roads you want to travel on.

As to live traffic My Tom Tom has a live traffic feature and it does work. Saved us some time recently when on holiday but again expect the alternative route to involve some interesting roads!

Be careful it doesn't direct you down very narrow roads to save 30 seconds off the journey. I find this the biggest fault of Sat Nav's.

In my experience they tend to be OK in the conurbations though my wife did get taken down a farm track to cut off a corner off a major road on her way to a training course in Winsford once. Where they are not so good in my experience is in rural areas.

Earlier in the year we were on holiday in Pembrokeshire and some of the routes the Sat Nav took us on were just plain idiotic. Based on that experience I bought a new road atlas for our recent holiday to Cornwall so I could check what the sat nav was coming up with. It turned out to be a wise move and I am sure sticking to the more obvious routes you could see on the map saved a lot of reversing and hairy passing maneuvers down narroe Cornish lanes. I still used the Sat Nav but when the next direction was to turn down an unnamed road I just ignored it and this seemed to work well.

One way around idiotic sat nav routes is to use itinerary planning if your sat nav supports it. Most if not all current Tom Tom sat navs [idon't[/i support it. They used to. My original Tom Tom One had it but the latest one I have does not. Some of the Garmin ones do and if yours does there is a bit of free software out there you can use with it called Tyre from here: www.tyretotravel.com/

The idea is you set multiple waypoints based on a Google Map route. This is not the same as "travel via" as that could still take you down an unwanted short cut. So using waypoints you get to tell the sat nav exactly which roads you want to travel on.

As to live traffic My Tom Tom has a live traffic feature and it does work. Saved us some time recently when on holiday but again expect the alternative route to involve some interesting roads!