TomTom Go 730 review

One of our favourite satnavs is TomTom's Go 720 (What's New, Shopper 237), and this is its successor.

The new model looks virtually identical but has 4GB of internal RAM, twice that of its predecessor, to store full street-level maps of 31 European countries.

It has the same 4.3in widescreen display as the 720 and is similarly packed with features. It has Bluetooth, so it can act as a hands-free kit for your phone, plus an FM transmitter, so it can give directions and play music through your car stereo, and a great text-to-speech engine, which enables it to read street names and numbers aloud.

The brilliant Help Me feature includes a Where am I? button that could prove useful if you need to call the emergency services. It can also direct you to nearby service stations, and stores phone numbers and addresses for them. Other extras include a music player, a photo viewer, a document reader and iPod control, plus the fun ability to record your own voice guidance instructions.

One of the new features is IQ route planning. Previously, the fastest routes were calculated using the maximum legal speed for each road, but now average recorded speeds are used. This means the 730 is less likely to route you through central London when it's far quicker, if longer, to go round the M25. The average speeds are split into weekday and weekend categories, but the system isn't clever enough to be sensitive to the time of day. This could feasibly be added in a future map update.

The 730 continues to let users make map corrections with the Map Share feature, and there are new ways to do it. You can now change turn restrictions and a road's speed limit. Be warned, though, that roads are split into many parts, and you have to enter the speeds for each part. You'll need to buy a new map every year to continue using Map Share.

Another new feature is Advance Lane Guidance. This shows images of certain motorway junctions with corresponding road signs and flashes green arrows down the lane you should be in. It's a handy visual aid, although we'd have loved this to have been implemented in busy city centres as well.

There are two slight annoyances. First, TomTom still hasn't updated the safety camera warnings to warn you only of cameras on your route rather than those in the other direction, so you're alerted to twice the number of cameras than you need to be. Second, the option to turn on the compass has been buried deep in the menus; the icon has been made much smaller and now only points north.

The 730 is a great satnav, and the new features are well worth having. At £255, it isn't cheap, but the large screen, clear, accurate navigation and wealth of features make it a fine choice.