Well its here, the Navman iCN630 is a fully integrated system with an ultra sharp 3.8" QVGA TFT screen which is automotive rated to ensure its up to the stresses and strains of in car life, at 16.2cm wide by 7.5cm high by 3.7cm thick and weighing 350grams it isn't the smallest device but it does include the GPS receiver and antenna meaning no external boxes. The innards of the unit are driven by a Intel 200mhz PXA250 processor and the 128mb of in built memory is split between 64mbs of map storage and 64mbs for the operating system to run in and make guidance calculations, the overall device memory can be expanded for larger or additional maps by use of the SD memory slot.

The IcN630 uses Tele Atlas maps to guide you both visually and by voice along your chosen route, so how does it operate and how does it fare against our favourite software Tom Tom Navigator 2?

Well it suffers from the same problems in starting your route and recognising the destination, there seems to be some issue when you specify both road name and town (either on their own work fine) this isn't always an issue but it can lead to you not being able to find a road that you know exists, however the iCN630 does have postcode recognition which works very well. The data entry uses the rubberised pad which is surrounded by other function keys, this access a qwerty style keypad which can be a little allow to drive, but in postcode mode you can quickly enter details with a house number without needing to type in those long welsh towns!

The all important Time to Fix (TTF) which is the period of time sat in the car park waiting for the unit to acquire enough satellites to calculate your position seems to be around 45 seconds with the longest we found at just over a minute, this is with the unit booting from cold. Once the Navman has a fix its a tenacious little unit hanging on in where a pocket PC based system would have given up long ago.

Having set our destination we can start our journey once the Navman has plotted our route, this is where the Navman which does not have to worry about Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system steals a march it is definitely faster than other systems we have tested which is great at the start of a trip and also a life saver when it comes to making are calculation early in a long route.

Having set our route we get a distance in miles and an estimated arrival time which are updated as the journey proceeds, you can also get a journey summary in some detail should you want to check where the planned route will take you before you consign the A to Z to the boot. The map rendering is excellent and the user interface is clear and intuitive, the voice guidance is good if sometimes a little quiet although we think this is due to the speaker being in the rear of the Navman unit also we did find that some commands were a bit close to the action needed, perhaps an early warning when at high speeds might be nice.

We found the Navman iCN630 to be a very reliable bit of kit guiding us to our location safely and by a good route selection, the roadblock feature works very well allowing one button press to re route you round traffic, one on route feature we loved was the auto zooming which closes the map in on upcoming turns and then zooms back out to give you a wider picture. The ST pro software (which Navman have released some years ago) is again tweaked for the iCN630 and seems to be the best version so far without any strange routing decisions mind you we didn't thrown too many demanding routes at it, it did seem to get a  bit confused in Milton Keynes but then again so do we!

The Navman iCN630 comes with everything you need including UK maps, power cable and mounting kit, there are 14 other European maps available which can be downloaded to the unit via USB or straight onto the SD card which you would need anyway if you wanted to keep the UK maps on the device as well, the software does have to be activated so you will need to hook it up via a PC to the web at least once. Software and firmware upgrades are available from the Navman Europe site which can also be installed via the USB connection.

So overall we do like the Navman its got some great features looks good and is very fast in operation it maybe a little quiet in a noisy car but this is a minor annoyance, it sits between 2 clear product areas, above are the manufacturer systems which are car specific and cost upwards of £1500 and below are the PDA combos like TomTom which can be yours with PDA for £500, at just under £1000 this is value for money but we can't help but wonder if a fast PDA with software would be more future proof. The iCN630 is a very competent solution which is a sound buy its one for the confirmed gadget lover who knows they just want sat nav without the clutter of a PDA.

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