I bought one of these new devices at Halfords for 400 quid a couple of days ago and here's my experiences to date.

1 The first device they sold me had a German operating system. The staff at Halfords said that was normal. I couldn't operate it so I insisted on a replacement and the next one had an English opertating system. Ignore their blurb "friendly staff can help you set it up". They can't, they're useless, they didn't have a clue.

2 There is a helpline, it is one pound a minute, and I got through to the switchboard who said someone would call me back. They did 24 hours later, by which time I had it working.

3 The AA Navigator website says that "you can avoid the unsightly ariel wire by routing it through your FM receiver". When I asked the suport team I was told to plug the aerial into the PDA. Duh, I knew that! I want to know how to route it through the radio without the unsightly wire being in the windscreen.

4 After running Navigator you can only turn off the device by going through a complete reset cycle. This means turning it on, waiting several seconds for it to boot up, and then turning it off. Dopey or what?

5 Finding destinations without knowing the postcode is nigh on impossible. I tried to find Virginia Street in Wapping, to no avail. It couldn't find it in Wapping or London. I tried Churchdale Road, Sheffield and Smalldale Road Sheffield, again no luck.

However when you can get it working, and if you do know the postcode it's quite a reasonable device and combines speedtrap GPS, traffic condition warning and sat nav well.

It is slow to recalculate.

It's a great pity that the package has flawed and buggy software and a slow responsive support team.