The 2610 was clamped to the dash of LP's motor and luckily for us it doesn't look like the older street pilot models that had more in keeping with a Woolworth's child's replica dashboard than a sleek SatNav system, instead the latest Garmin system is more than acceptable and far removed from the older street pilot design.

We set-up the 2610 on its bean bag style mount, when you first see this mounting system there is a bit of a disbelief that it will keep expensive electronics safe when you are hacking along some country roads, but no its very good and even survive LP's driving, best of all its easy to swap to another car.

Having loaded the UK maps to the supplied 256mb CF card on the office PC it was time to hit the road for the planned test, the Garmin 2610 had finally got a touch screen alongside the panel buttons which were the only input method on the older models. The touch screen is good but we decided to pay with the supplied remote control for our journey, while we've seen these with audio head units and always wondered why you need a remote for something you are right next to it seemed worth a try.

Setting our destination was easy enough as Garmin have gone with a fairly simple tab system whereby most of the common features are available on the main menu screen on tabs, the settings can be played with but we had little time to explore other than to set a combination of fastest / best route and set the system to miles per hour. On firing the unit up sat on LP's dashboard it took about 2 mins to get that first fix which is a little sluggish but that gave us time to input the destination using the first 5 digits of the postcode and confirming the address, the route planning was fairly quick but that said a good chunk of our trip was on the M25.

As we left the car park the winter night was drawing in and the self dimming screen slowly reduced the amount of light it was pumping into the cabin, the antireflective screen coating seemed to help in the late afternoon sun and also as the trip progressed the streetlights through the side window of the car.

The route was not the one we would have picked but it was efficient none the less, the Navtec maps are good but can be a little slow to be updated for changes but they are very detailed in the UK and the 2610 had no issues on the first half of our journey. Of course we took a few turns to throw it off track but it calmly routed us back and didn't seem to suffer the long delay in re plotting that the street pilot III exhibited.

The Voice navigation isn't the most detailed we've used but it is just about loud enough probably on a par with the Navman iCN510 we tested a few weeks back but nowhere near as loud as the TomTom go unit. We didn't plan to try the waypoint feature but on route got a call that meant we had to go into deepest darkest north London to pickup another gadget for test.

This waypoint was entered and could be given a name (restricted to 10 characters) the route was then re calculated to include our new stop and still get back to our final destination. At this point LP was playing with the various map views and commenting on how the 2D only view was a little basic compared to the 3D Navman units when he clocked the on / off button (which is very easy to do) having re powered the unit we were without guidance for over a minute while it got lock again.

Indeed the user experience with the Garmin 2610 is a little basic, sure the menus are good but the whole map colour scheme and icons are a bit basic, controlling the unit is easy enough we even began to like the remote control even if you do have to use it almost head on to make it work. Perhaps this unit is meant for those who want no nonsense routing, there aren't traffic add on's or many extras (apart from an external antenna) but it does have one killer application.

And that's for those who travel in Europe, that is the point where most SatNav systems need a new card or even move onto limited maps of major trunk roads only, not the Garmin 2610, you can download the whole European map if you wish, of course you'll need a 2gb CF card but they are very reasonably priced. The download of data is quite slow so you'll probably choose to just download the areas you need and then a 1gb CF card will be ample.

We made our waypoint with little fuss and picked up the Archos Video player for test and then headed off again with the Garmin accurately guiding us turn by turn, one comment that we did have is that the display is a little slow to update which means if you rely on the screen for guidance you could miss a turn, but in combination with the voice commands this is unlikely.

Arriving safely at our destination it was quick to de rig the Garmin 2610 from its bean bag perch, the £559 2610 is a serious investment which dwarfs the £408 tomtom go in terms of price but we think this is well worth the extra if you intend to make use of the European maps.

More Garmin GPS Reviews

More GPS system reviews -

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