Slide the 520 out of the box and apart from a smaller and slimmer design yet retaining a good sized screen the 520 looks like a TomTom. The mount is a slightly revised version of the one on the 510 and 710 and should hold the unit firmly enough and allows quick removal when you leave the car. Fire up the 520 and the familiar and yet improved TomTom UI leaps into life but beneath the friendly and simple interface lies a new twist to SatNav (at least for TomTom) one that means our grubby mitts may just stay off the unit and help keep the screen clean.

The headline grabber here is not just text to speech conversion so you get spoken road names, but the reverse speech to text so you can now say your destination to your TomTom and it will lay in the route, cool eh? So without further delay we leapt into trying out the new spangly features and you'll have to take our word that as a navigation device the new 520 is up to the mark of pervious TTG units.

So the voice control, well the unit shows no obvious signs of being voice activated no big stickers or flashing lights, just a menu option to speak your address, it guides you through from city to street to house number. As you say each section it repeats back and shows on screen a list of possibilities, you can either say Ok to select if it has got it right or jump in and use the touch screen. Our first test was while sat in the office and we managed to enter a London address first time with the 520 getting the correct street 1st time. We tried a few tricky names with about a 90% success rate with only 1 street causing a few issues, you do have to speak very clearly which concerned us a little for our next test.

As the TomTom is going to be in car we had to test the voice input while in car with engine running and then on the move, both of which are very common situations. The first test stationary with engine running (but radio off) went as well as those in the office, we then set off at about 30mph and hit the button and attempted to enter a destination. City was fine but the street accuracy seemed to drop as background noise started to kick in and the unit struggled to differentiate between words.

Increase speed further and sadly much like the hands free on earlier TTG models the voice recognition falls apart to the point where at motorway speeds we just gave up trying. Although not entirely unexpected it is a shame as on the move the voice control could really add an element of safety which will stop people trying to operate menus while on the move. In truth the voice control is perfect when sat ready to move off as a lazy mans way to input a destination.

Now if that was all that's new on this TomTom Go 520 the review would be fairly short and perhaps struggle to recommend an upgrade, but the Dutch company have gone further and added more to this new unit. A very nifty feature is an FM transmitter, these until recently were illegal in the UK but a change in the law has made them appear in all sorts of units. The 520 uses FM transmission to link its audio output to your car stereo meaning you can have the TomTom spoken instructions very loud and clear! also you can finally make use of the MP3 player on the Go which had always been a joke when limited to the units own speaker.

This 520 differs from the more expensive 720 in that it uses internal flash memory of 215mb and maps are stored on SD / MMC cards which slide into the unit, the 720 has a hard drive and also has street level euro maps where as this unit has UK and Eire plus the main roads of western Europe. If you are planning to stay in blighty this is all you'll ever need and you can buy more maps for download via TomTom Home should you need a map for say France only.

One of our reviews around Christmas time was of the TMC extra that TomTom had started to ship, the Fm receiver was an outboard unit which uses FM transmission of traffic data to update the screen of the TomTom. This is now standard on the 520 and 720 and has been better integrated in this 3rd generation UI, where traffic alerts pop up and ask you if you want to re router, you can even use the voice control to say yes or no. from our tests it seems that even the TMC data has gotten a little better and now that you are not forking out extra for it, we can recommend it as a nice extra.

Mapping has taken a bit of a leap into the web 2.0 world too with MapShare, which TomTom claim to be a community based mapping system, whereby users can amend maps, so if you find something wrong, say a speed limit or one way street you can make a note on your unit. Then when you next connect up to a PC running the TomTom home software your change is uploaded to TomTom who check it and then should update the maps of everyone else! This makes things like the speed camera maps and speed safety warning system more reliable and is a good idea.

We wonder where this ends though? give the TTG a full time data connection and you could upload your location in real time, if enough users did this it would form a highly accurate traffic system, far fetched? maybe not.

Delve a little further and we get into the extras bundle which this time includes "guides" a series of unit based notes to help with certain situations which appear under a menu called Help me. The available guides on the system are based on a text viewer with embedded hyperlinks and while the idea is a good one with both first aid and driving guides a few minutes use shows that the screen and the navigation is not suited to this kind of guide. Try scrolling down the list of country driving guides to fin the UK and you soon discover that you cannot keep your finger on the touch screen and scroll leaving you madly tapping the screen like a loony.

Also under help me section is a quick way to call the emergency services presuming you have your mobile hooked up to the Go 520 via Bluetooth, you can call for help and also to the AA or for that matter any number you programme using the hands free system. The nice touch is that your current location is displayed on screen in simple to read notes so you can tell whoever you have called, the list of help types includes hospitals and even has their phone numbers.

We haven't neglected the basic navigation capability of the TomTom 520 in the review, during all these tests the Go performed way above its competition in route selection, re routing, guidance and quality of both displayed and spoken instructions. Its hard to explain other than to say that the TomTom UI is the iPod of SatNav systems and nothing else comes close. For example we are all used to being able to download new voices for your SatNav but the 3rd Gen TomTom goes one step further, you can record your own. Simply speak the 57 phrases needed into your Go and you can soon be guided by your own voice, or perhaps that of the Wife! (shivers).

Measuring 118 x 83 x 24mm and weighing 220 grams the new TomTom Go 520 is smaller than the older series with a much improved mounting system making it far more portable, it even has an improved 5hr battery to make navigation away from a power source more practical.

Priced at just under £250 as we went to press the TomTom Go 520 is the most complete system we have tested to date, sure we can pick little holes in some of the extras but as a rounded SatNav system you just can't beat the 3rd generation in TomTom's

Published - 01/10/2007

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