Navman S90i

Navman is one of the oldest players in consumer sat nav but has seen the likes of TomTom take the lion’s share of the market. To help address this, its latest series has had a fairly radical redesign and the S90i is its flagship. But has it helped?

At first glance the Navman’s S90i is a fairly run-of-the-mill sat nav, but it actually has several points that make it unique. The 4.3in widescreen display is now standard fare, as is the SD card slot for choonage (a headphone socket lies underneath a cover on the left) but the curved edges make it that bit friendlier to pick up and its very light too.

The top of the unit sports two buttons, one for power and the other for taking pictures – yes, pictures, as round the back of the S90i you’ll find a camera.

Photo finish

The idea is that you take a picture of a location, which is then ‘geo-tagged.’ You can then navigate straight to this place just by selecting the picture and there are hordes of suitably tagged locations available for download from Navman’s website and Flickr.

It does act as an extra way of recognising your destination before you get there, but unless it’s something you’ll use regularly it has a slightly gimmicky feel to it.

Spell and Speak

Another odd feature is that as you enter in your addresses it reads out each letter too you, though the only real benefit we found was that you then could tell straight away that you’d selected the wrong key, which we found happened repeatedly even though we don’t have fat fingers.

When driving, however, the male voice is a decidedly dreary fellow who sounds as if he’d rather be anywhere else than in a car giving you directions. It was almost enough for us to pull over and walk the rest of the way!

In the neighbourhood

The Navman matches the competition for features such as Bluetooth hands free and it put in a better performance with this that the Garmin Nuvi 770. TMC is present and although it didn’t pick up anything for us you might have better mileage, so to speak.

The Navman interface is easy to get to grips with and has some nice features such as dedicated on screen buttons for locating various useful things such as petrol stations, parking, food and cash points and it proved comprehensive in our tests. However, its safety camera alert was so timid you’ll be picking up tickets in no time.

Overall, the S90i doesn’t quite have the class and polish of a TomTom, but it’s not too far off. Its NavPix feature is gimmicky but still fits into the ‘nice-to-have’ category and you can pick this top-end unit for less than £170, so if you’re looking for a decent sat nav on a budget, the S90i the gets thumbs up.