It's been the holy grail of SatNav companies and traffic data companies like trafficmaster to combine street routing and traffic information to provide routing that is aware of hold up's and delays, finally TomTom traffic claims to do this and so we thought it only right to use our 3 month trial to let you know what it's like.

First off lets explain how TomTom traffic works, in essence its a plug-in to the Tom Tom 3 navigator street mapping system, it overlays traffic information onto the routes panned by the system and gives you warning of hold up's and accidents that will effect your journey time.

It does this by using the TMC data that is also broadcast on FM in the UK (alongside the classic FM signal) however TomTom does not use the FM signal but instead connects via a GPRS data connection through either the PDA itself (if it has the capability) or via a GPRS signal from a suitably equipped mobile phone.

Using our P800 and an orange GPRS connection we were able to hook up a HP Ipaq running TomTom 3 via Bluetooth, the configuration was a little awkward but the main difficulty was hooking the P800 to the PDA using BT, once this was accomplished TT3 could be set-up to look for it's traffic data on the GPRS connection. The Tom Tom Traffic system checks for new traffic data periodically which can be set by the user, we chose a 10 minute interval to monitor LP's daily slog around the M25, the average download seemed to be around 8k of data so this should see about 400 "traffic checks" out of a basic monthly GPRS package of 3mb which costs £3 on orange.

You can set the TomTom system to only update on a manual trigger (screen icon) but if you are that worried about the GPRS cost perhaps you'd do better to stick to the RDS FM broadcasts, TomTom are currently offering a free trial to all TT3 owners until September 2004 this of course excludes the GPRS costs but saves you the 9.95 Euro monthly cost.

So the big question what's it like?

Well on our first journey the TomTom traffic system had an easy test, a whopping big smash at South Mimms J21, no sooner had we left home the TT3 display showed a new icon one that indicated our chosen route had a hold up, we could then select to see what the hold up was and how bad the queue was. Of course as the M25 had been closed it was a fairly easy spot for TT3 and its traffic system plus the accident was a good hour old, nevertheless TT3 plotted a route avoiding the accident and even managed to avoid trying to bring us up the A1 where a queue was also forming.

The next morning and LP happily heads past London Colny only to hit a big queue, check TomTom but no warning given, this queue is not much more than a normal Tuesday hold up but we had mistakenly thought that TomTom would give the same level of detail as the old Trafficmaster YQ2 that LP had in his old Vauxhall Astra. It seems that the TMC data which TomTom are reliant upon is not as quick as trafficmaster network of blue poles and tends to only transmit major hold ups, like the accident the day before.

Having had one hit and one miss it was time to try out TomTom on a longer run and a trip to a supplier, this gave us a chance to see some of the other Icons (other than the accident one) and discover that pressing them brought up details on the location and likely length of delay plus the option to re route, in fact its a nice interface. Again it was a bit hit and miss with TT3 getting us round a big smash only to get caught up in a queue that we didn't get informed of, plus on this longer and faster run the GPRS connection via orange kept dropping out mid download, not tom-tom's problem but it may be a flaw in the plan to use GPRS as the connection method.

Overall the TomTom traffic plug-in is a useful extra and it does enhance the already excellent TomTom 3 which you can read our review here, but we're not sure that its worth paying so much extra (about £9 including GPRS bandwidth) for TMC information which some car radios can pickup and display for free.

It's rare for TomTom to make a bad move so perhaps the TMC data is due to improve? or maybe they will switch data feeds, but for now we have to say (as much as it pains us to do so) that TomTom traffic's much like the grolsch "just not ready yet".

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