Navman S80 Review

Overall Rating

Real-Time traffic information, Bluetooth Hands-Free, Large Screen.

Map a little slow to update, can be tricky on multiple turns close together as instructions can be delayed by a second or two.

The Navman S80 is my first venture away from the SatNav giants TomTom, and I'm not disappointed at all. By far the most useful feature of the S80 is it's built-in TMC receiver which operates through Classic FM giving real-time traffic updates to your system. The system can then advise you of the traffic situation on your route, the speed of the traffic ahead, the time taken to clear the traffic and when available, what's causing the disruption. It will even reroute you automatically around any major traffic events if you set it to do so. Having used this system for the past week or so, I am incredibly impressed with it. The system has on one occasion rerouted me around a 40-minute traffic jam on the A1 in around 10 minutes, cutting half an hour off my journey. Traffic Information is provided free of charge for life with the S80, ulike systems which use TrafficMaster/RAC traffic information which require a subscription. The S80 also comes with built-in Bluetooth hands free and is incredibly easy to pair and use with almost any mobile phone which supports it (I even managed to get it to work with my iPhone, which was impressive). The S80 can download your phone's contacts and text messages onto it's internal memory, allowing you to dial directly and read texts from the 4.3 inch widescreen without using your phone at all. Another cool feature of the S80 is the mileage reporter, which calculates how far you've travelled on each route, your average speed and the time spent idling, you can upload this data to your PC or Mac using the NavDesk software provided and let it calculate your fuel costs for each journey (a useful feature for business drivers claiming expenses). The S80 comes with all the usual SatNav features like POI (points of interest) which lists over 500,000 businesses, petrol stations, ATMs, car parks, Airports, Railway stations and a whole host of others. It also has a very innovative feature called "NavPix", which allows you to browse a selection of photographs, and will navigate you to that place to see for yourself (you can download more NavPix from the NavDesk application on your PC, or even create your own). In the POI interface, the S80 also lists every Speed Camera and Red Light camera in the UK (at the time the map was updated) and will alert you to their presence up to 1,000 yards in advance. You can download new speed camera locations using NavDesk for a subscription of around £30 a year. All-in-all a very useful piece of kit, and at £139.99 exclusively from Halfords, it is cheaper than even some of the most basic competitor products.