We have to admit that SatNav has revolutionised our day to day driving, its one of those things that you didn't know you needed until you bought it and then can't do without, but until now you've had to use a PDA or stand alone system. But the next move in SatNav is the mobile phone based system and those masters of SatNav for pocket PC Tom Tom bring us TomTom Mobile.

TomTom have arranged there product set around the same core navigation engine and have in this release optimised it to run on the new breed of Smartphone, this is now possible due to many mobiles having SD or MMC cards allowing expansion of storage to a sufficient point that the UK maps can be loaded.

TomTom Mobile is currently available for the Nokia 6600, Orange SPV-E200 and Qtek 8080 with promises or further phone support in the coming weeks and months, unlike some of the competitor smartphone navigation systems the TomTom platform will run on Symbian 7.0s and Microsoft's Smartphone 2003 (Windows Mobile).

Clearly using a navigation system on a phone imposes some tricky issues, but TomTom are confident they have created a useable navigation system within the bounds of a mobile phone, data entry is a mixture of keyboard and T9 dictionary input. To enter a location to navigate to you first select the icon using the phones keypad or joystick, then enter the first letter of the place and then the second as the T9 kicks in and suggests the full name of the place, you do this for town then road then finally enter the door number. The GUI has been optimised for the smaller screen real estate with much of the spurious data removed leaving just the bare essentials and a look and feel which is more like the Palm tomtom rather than the windows version.

Calculation of your route is fairly speedy but this depends on your phones capabilities, the Nokia 6600 seems to fare well and the optimisation of TomTom Mobile seems to have worked well. The GPS signal is derived from the TomTom Bluetooth receiver which will be familiar to those of us who own TomTom 3 Bluetooth version, it is without doubt one of the smallest and lightest BT receivers available and can be battery of mains powered.

You need to setup your mobile to look for the BT receiver for the GPS information but this is fairly easy from the TomTom software and supplied user guide, initial lock can take a few minutes but after that you should get a fix within a minute or so of switching on the system. Now the thorny issue of Bluetooth Piconets does raise its head here, in theory Bluetooth should be able to support multiple devices talking to the same phone but we have already head of SPV users having difficulties using a Bluetooth headset and TomTom mobile at the same time and Nokia have confirmed that the 6600 only has a single BT connection which cannot be shared. Of course you can use a normal wired hands free and the software will mute TomTom mobiles instructions while you take the call, but the Bluetooth connection limitation may be a problem for some and one that is more the issue of the mobile phone manufacturers than TomTom.

The software and the UK maps come pre loaded on a 128mb MMC card which slots into the side of the phone, there is a little room on it left for you to use and abuse but don't expect there to be much space!

Tom Tom promise that the new mobile software will also get the TomTom traffic plugins we reviewed a few weeks back and that will make more sense as the GPRS connection required will stay within the phone making configuration much easier, lets just hope the traffic information has improved by then.

With TomTom mobile on sale now for £175 the Dutch company are once again proving to be innovators in satellite navigation systems for the mobile device, first the PDA, then the award winning tom tom go and now TomTom mobile, we wouldn't bet against them cleaning up in the smartphone market!

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