During the course of my work as an independent financial adviser, I often have to leave the office to visit clients and whilst some of these live in areas well known to me, others live in the sticks in less familiar territory. In the past, I have never had an issue with getting the trusty A-to-Z out of the door pocket and looking up where to go but just occasionally, the complexity of a destination's route has left me stopping on many occasions having inadvertently lost my position.

And so, around 6 months ago, I splashed out on TomTom Navigator 3 opting for the bluetooth GPS receiver version and never looked back. TTN3 had its shortcomings, particularly the inability to plan a route in advance without actually going into Navigation mode. Additionally, TomTom began marketing additional services such as Traffic and it was obvious these were going to be expanded. Sure enough, TomTom Plus was launched which included a raft of add-ons some free and some on a subscription-only basis such as Traffic and more recently, Speed Camera locations.

According to the TomTom website, TTN5 is still not available to purchase if you're a new customer at least not from TomTom direct. However, registered users of earlier versions were contacted around 4-6 weeks ago, to advise of a special offer to upgrade to TTN5. The prospect of paying another €59, in addition to the couple of hundred paid earlier in the year, did not fill me with much glee. However, as part of the upgrade, TomTom were providing the full set of European road data not just the originally purchased map data and major roads. This means upgraders now have complete European map data although Eastern Europe isn't 100% coverage. Of course, if you plan to install additional maps to your PPC, remember storage is going to be an issue and that 1GB SD card might now need purchasing!

The upgrade pack consists of a several CDs and a new product activation code. Installation was simple enough except you are advised to manually copy any self-installed POI files and also manually delete the map folder on your SD card. Why this process couldn't be fully automated I don't know. I chose to install just the GB map which took around 100MB of space. Post codes took a further 10MB although it later became apparent that manual intervention was required to move the post code data files (stored in a directory called ZIP) as without this, full post code navigation would not work. Again, I question why?

Once running, activation is performed via the TomTom website and I was up and running in no time. As I had purchased an SPV M2000 to run TTN5 on, I now had to migrate my existing TomTom Traffic account to the new PPC but this proved extremely troublesome. In an effort to prevent defrauding the company of income, those TomTom Plus services available via subscription only (such as Traffic and Speed Cameras) are encrypted when sent via the GPRS (mobile phone data) stream and hence it is necessary to tell TomTom the device code of the PPC you are accessing the service on. This, in turn, generates a unique code which allows only that device to decrypt the data. After much messing about, it transpired I had to first reset my TomTom Plus account, then register a new device code and then enter the settings on my PPC. However, changing the device code was problematical and involved an email to TomTom Support who, at the present time, are working to a 7-10 working day turnaround which, to be frank, is reprehensible for product support.

Anyway, I successfully got my Traffic account migrated onto the M2000 and TTN5 was up and running.

First off, users of M2000 (and presumably any other PPC fitted with its own hardware keyboard) beware! In the past, when TTN requested the user to enter data such as the destination city, street, etc an on-screen keyboard would appear which could be used simply by touching the screen. This facility has been removed, presumably as TomTom feel I should be using the hardware keypad on my M2000. However, when in the car with the PPC in its cradle I sometimes want to enter new info and having to remove the PPC and slide the keypad out is extremely annoying and very inconvenient. This is a major disappointment with TTN5 as far as I am concerned.

Other than this, I'm fairly pleased with TTN5. "Navigate to" allows selection of home, favourites, address, recent desintation, point of interest, postcode, point on map, city centre, GPS position and POI in city, therefore offering a comprehensive choice of selecting your destination. Note that full UK postcodes are available although be aware, its now 100% accuracy. According to TomTom selecting my home address by post code results in an adjacent side road being chosen which whilst not the end of the world, is not actually correct. In my experience, its almost always better to use the "search by address" facility.

Having selected a destination city and street, it's then possible to choose an individual house number and whilst not all streets are covered in this detail, residential areas tend to be pretty good and accurate too. The destination chequered flag will invariably be pretty much spot on where you want to be if you indicate the house number too.

TomTom Traffic is now built-in to TTN5 as opposed to being an extra piece of software to be downloaded under TTN3. The route overview takes the form of a narrow vertical bar down the RHS of the navigating screen showing where traffic hotspots are located in relation to the current navigating route. For those not subscribing to Traffic, the "bar" should not prove invasive.

"Find Alternative" has some useful features. Firstly, if you're caught in a roadblock due to accident, congestion or whatever you can quickly tell TTN5 to avoid the road ahead for the next (100 yards, ¼ mile, 1 mile, 3 miles) in an attempt to bypass the problem. Alternatively you can tell TTN5 to avoid an entire road altogether if the situation merits this drastic action. For those subscribing to TomTom Traffic, "minimise traffic delays" is a useful feature. And, just as with TTN3, if having changed the original route, you want to go back to it at any time, "recalculate original" will do just that.

One of the problems I found with TTN3 was the complexity involved with actually planning a route in advance. Now, the Advanced Planning option has been introduced which does just that. Just like under normal Navigation mode, you can choose the fastest or shortest route, those avoiding motorways, and routes suitable for walking and cycling too. An overview map will then show the entire route from which you can browse as text, images or zoom/pan in and out of the overview to your heart's content. The "show route demo" feature continues from TTN3.

"Browse map" is also a hang-over from TTN3 allowing you to simply view the map and click to your current position and zoom/pan around.

"Itinerary planning" has been improved allowing further points to be added under TTN5 than previously. Individual journeys can be saved and loaded whenever and TomTom will even offer to navigate you to the first point before offering to then take you to each point in sequence. TTN3 offered itinerary planning also although I believe TTN5 has improved the functionality and useability in this area.

"TomTom Weather" offers to obtain the latest atmospheric conditions for any address (selected in the same way as for navigation) although this is accessed via GPRS and therefore not all PPCs will be able to make use of this function. The couple of times I've tried it, the resulting weather report hasn't always been for the area I requested either!

"Download extras" is a new feature on TTN5. If you travel to an area not covered by your current TomTom installed data (so for example, let's say I travel to France but don't have the French maps installed) I can download a map of Paris (for a fee) and use it just as I would normally. The map of Manchester is nearly 3MB in size and costs €10. You can also download POIs such as Speed Cameras (the UK version costs €70) although I prefer to get these via POI Edit which offers these and a lot more besides free of charge. You can also download new voices for your guidance system - John Cleese has just recorded one and his is €10. Other "generic" human beings are half that price. New map colours can be downloaded (free of charge) allowing you to customise the appearance of TTN5.

And speaking of customsing, the "preferences" options have grown to. Switching to day/night colours remains, as does turning off the 2D/3D map display and hiding all POI and turning off sound altogether are inherited from TTN3. Sound volume is there as is manage favourites, change home location, switch map (if you've installed or downloaded others) as well as "manage POI". This allows you to add, enable, remove, disable POI files either downloaded from TomTom or installed manually yourself. An interesting feature is the "warn when near POI" which lets you choose a POI file (say a speed camera location file) and have the system alert you with a number of pre-selected sounds when you're within a user-definable distance of them. Toll and congestion charge options are included, an on-screen compass remains an option although is customisable much more than under TTN3 and the ability to rotate the screen is useful for those who want landscape rather than traditional portrait.

One final feature to mention relates to "call number". Many POIs already included contain telephone numbers so you can, for instance, telephone the nearest post office to where you are located simply by selecting it (needs your PPC to be a phone too though!).

The map data itself seems pretty good. Not found any errors to date and TomTom claim they will issue updates. A useful feature now is the ability to have all road names appear on screen (even side roads as you pass them) which enables a little extra verification you're on the right road - handy when you've got someone else in the car helping you out for those really awkward and stressful city routes.

One further word of warning for you. TTN5 comes with several POI files enabled as default. In this mode, when using TTN5 I found the screen updated itself only around once a second thereby creating a fairly jery motion. As I tend not to use any of the POI files anyway, I turned them all off and this has resulted in an update rate of around 3-4 times a second meaning the maps now scroll very smoothly giving a more realistic account of your journey. Now you might then say, what about speed camera POI files. Well, although I do not have them enabled, I do have the "warn when near POI" active for the speed camera files which means when I get within the set distance, the location of the POI pops up on the map and the alert tone sounds. When I've passed it, it vanishes from view. And all this whilst still maintaining the faster screen refresh rate. This is almost certainly performance related and the fact my PPC isn't an out-and-out performance device. But something for fellow SPV users to consider.

Overall TTN5 shows some useful advancements of TTN3 including the additional POI functionality, the A-to-B advanced planning and the inclusion of full postcodes. For those thinking of upgrading be warned the "special offer" is time-limited and prices may change at any time. For those wanting to buy TTN5 as a first time TTN user you'll have to wait a bit longer.


P.S. I am a UK-based user and therefore speed cameras, post codes, etc relate to the UK functionality.