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Summer’s officially here and it’s holiday season. If you’re planning on trips closer to home this year, we’ve picked out a few sat navs to help you on your way. From the traditional in-car sat navs to handheld GPS trackers, you’re sure to find something to suit you.

For an in-car system that’s a bit different, check out the Navman S30 3D. You can see all landmarks in 3D and you can upload all the info about them and local attractions via the Navdesk on your PC so that you have all the interesting facts with you as you travel.

If you’re planning a road trip, Che Guevara style, you’ll want a rider sat nav. The TomTom Rider 2nd Edition UK & Ireland has a 3.5″ glove-friendly touch screen, helmet connection and Secure RAM mount. It’s also waterproof so you can splash though as many puddles as you like.

For the treckers amongst you, check out the Garmin eTrex H. It’s built for tough conditions, it’s waterproof and it only has five buttons which can be easily operated with one hand. It will last up to 17 hours on just two AA batteries and will store up to 500 waypoints in its memory for easy retrieval. There’s also the TrackBack® system which will take you back to your starting point by reversing your track log.

If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at our sat nav buyers guide.  or look through the best sat navs on Reevoo.

Fancy thousands of radio stations from all over the world in your car? Wish you could listen to the best US rock stations or the most popular Australian channels from the comfort of your own motor. Well, the waiting’s over - the internet car radio was unveiled by Blaupunkt and miRoamer at CES earlier this year and proved a big hit.

The gadget will bring you thousands of global radio stations which you can preset and listen to through the panel in your dashboard. At the moment, internet connectivity is through an external device such as 3G/HSDPA/HSPA devices which then connect to the panel via Bluetooth but later models will come with a built-in modem. However, this Bluetooth connectivity means that you can also access your phone, address book and sat nav through the radio. Anyone else thinking Knight Rider?

The Blaupunkt/miRoamer internet car radio will be launched in Europe late this year for around £275 US $399. It’s sure to be the first in a line of new and exciting in-car technology.

Happy 2009!

Hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and New Year.

Let’s kick off 2009 with a time and space saving gadget. There have been lots of rumours about the Powermat but at this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Association), we’ve finally heard that they will be in stores this year.

What are they? They’re mats that can be plugged in and will simultaneously charge a whole heap of gadgets, all at the same time, wirelessly.

That’s no more chargers cluttering up your house, no more tangled wires and no need to use multiple plugs when you need to charge up more than one thing at the same time.

The Powermat uses magnetic induction and, according to the website, “When a Powermat-enabled device is placed on the mat, a “handshake” process synchronizes the mat with the receiver and electric power is generated to meet the specific energy needs of the device.”They’ll then monitor the power in the device and disconnect power to each device once they’ve finished charging.

Powermats will also be able to be used in cars with their universal, window mount car charger for hand-held devices.

At the moment, you can use the Powermat with mobile phones, laptops, iPods, digital cameras, handheld games consoles and sat navs.

Pretty exciting stuff but we still have no word on prices. So we’ll wait and see about the price tags on these things before we go ahead and liberate our chargers.

For more info, check out the website.

Cars aren’t the greenest of things so we’re always glad when we find something that we can use to save energy in them. This week’s Green Piece is all about the Sunsei 150 solar car battery charger. It will trickle charge a 12v car battery but can also be used in tractors, small boats, motorbikes and other small vehicles.

It’s ideal if you’re trying to use your car less or take it off the road but you’re worried that the battery will go flat. It will also save electricity if you need to charge your battery via a mains charger. And, of course, it will help all of us who don’t have that handy bleeping noise that alerts us to the fact that we’ve left our lights on when we get out of the car.

All in all, a pretty handy green gadget. You just mount the panel on the inside of your car window, using the suction cups and connect it to the cigarette lighter or directly to the battery with the crocodile clips provided.

You can pick one up here for £29.99 if you’re in the UK or here for $48.88 for US readers.

If you’re always getting lost, you may also want to invest in a sat nav - just think how much petrol you waste and how much CO₂ you emit when you’re correcting ‘navigation malfunctions’!

It’s half term next week which means many of us will be carting the kids around for days out, going to visit relatives and possibly getting stuck trying to find things to do. Well, while you’re in the car, a little something called Sat-Nanny may be able to help when you need to stop-off somewhere with the kids or if you’re just trying to find fun things to do.

Sat-Nanny is a joint initiative from the folks over at www.childfriendly.co.uk and RoadTour. It’s a programme that works on most sat navs that will let parents know where the nearest child-friendly stops and activities for little tykes are.

Here are a couple of examples of some of the places it will pull up and the info it will give parents:

The Crown- Twickenham: This pub boasts a huge enclosed beer garden, with two fenced off play areas for children of different age groups, making it easy for adults to relax in the knowledge kids are happy and safe.  There is plenty of space for families to eat inside as well, and car parking available.  There is a children’s menu, but the food is limited to the stock options (pizza, fish fingers & macaroni cheese).  Food for adults is typical gastro pub fare - nothing extraordinary, but well priced.  There are baby-changing facilities.

The Mohair Centre- East Sussex: This is definitely a children’s farm with angora goats all ready to be stroked by the kids and other farm animals such as pigs, cows and chickens. In Spring, you’ll be able to watch the lambing and kidding. No kidding! There are also spinning and weaving demonstrations and a nature trail to help the kids, yours not theirs, explore life on the farm.

Hmmm, who was all up for getting it until they read that?!

Well, regardless of the strange lingo, it will help parents find some nice places to take their children. It only costs a one-off fee of £9.95 so it may be worth it. You can download it here: www.roadtour.co.uk.

You can also see a demo here: Sat-Nanny demo

If you’re still relying on traditional methods of navigation that force you to stop every so often to mess around with a big book of roads, treat yourself and get your hands on a nice, shiny satellite navigation system.

Those shoppers over on Reevoo have been making us chuckle this week…

"
when freshly charged it is bursting with energy like a frisky mare" Picooz Insecta Night R/C Helicopter

"Spent the best part of a month staring at the screen blankly, being totally lost without the "Start Bar" before i finally cracked and spent 10 mins reading the built in help…And poke me sideways with a large mucky stick if its not all starting to make very pure and perfect sense. Apple I-MAC 24

"I have never been attracted to Yoga until I started Wii Fit…I like the personal trainers, (especially when a handsome young man tells me my "form is fantastic"!!!) Nintendo Wii Fit

"
Powerful Blow. Weak suck" Black & Decker GW370 Electric Blower Vac

"
dosn’t like to take ferries" Garmin Nuvi 250

Not content with simple maps, Nokia have teamed up with Lonely Planet to create a mobile tourist map extravaganza.  Adventurers can download city guides to their mobiles for over 100 hot tourist destinations so that the “where shall we eat” question need never be uttered again. Among the restaurant recommendations, you can also find where to sleep, shop, visit and boogie. No more heavy books and highlighters to pack in with your toothbrush and sleeping bags.

There was mutual love-giving from Nokia and Lonely Planet with Maximilian Schierstadt, head of media partnerships, at Nokia context-based services, saying: "Lonely Planet is a well-known brand amongst travellers and stands for adventure and editorial independence.

"We are very excited to offer their expert local recommendations and itineraries to our Nokia Maps consumers, which will allow Nokia to continue to innovate and enable compelling location-aware experiences."

Stephen Palmer, CEO of Lonely Planet Publications, added: "This is a genuinely transformational deal, which makes Lonely Planet content available regardless of time or place… Together with Nokia we will help more travellers connect profoundly with their world, everyday."

You can get your hands on the city guides from today. They’re £5.99 / USD 13.99 / EUR 7.99, and can be found in the Guides section in the Extras menu. For more info, head to Nokia.

It seems us Brits are baffled by modern technology that was sent to help us. According to a poll of 2000 people (by the folks over at Reevoo), mobile phones, SatNavs and even TV remotes send us into panic and rage when we can’t figure out how to use them. In fact, a whopping 32% of people admitted to throwing a complicated gadget across the room when they couldn’t work out what to do with it.

Digital cameras were voted the most complicated with SatNavs and mobile phones close behind. Interestingly though, people are obviously happy to live in confusion with their SatNavs, as only 6% actually read the manuals!

More alarming is that the same numbers of us are as baffled by our laptops as our ovens (the nation’s health crisis suddenly makes sense now…). And people are more inclined to read their TV manual over their oven’s. Hmmmm.

And even when a device goes wrong, more than a quarter will try to fix it themselves, or even buy a new one, instead of turning to the instructions.

Here’s the full list of things we find complicated:

1.    Digital Camera - 26%
2.    GPS navigation    - 21%
3.    Mobile phone - 19%
4.    Washing machine - 18%
5.    Camcorder - 17%
6.    DVD player - 15%
7.    Games console - 13%
8.    TV remote control - 13%
9.    MP3 player - 13%
10.    Microwave - 12%
11.    Computer - 12%
12.    Digital photo frame - 12%
13.    Scanner - 11%
14.    Laptop - 10%
15.    Television - 10%
16.    Modem - 10%
17.    Oven - 9%
18.    Printer - 9%
19.    Answer machine - 9%
20.    Freeview box - 8%
21.    Broadband - 8%
22.    Sky - 8%
23.    Dishwasher - 7%
24.    Digital TV - 7%
25.    Hi Fi system - 7%
26.    Tumble dryer - 6%
27.    Iron - 6%
28.    Telephone - 6%
29.    Clock Radio - 5%
30.    Smoke alarm - 5%
31.    Electric timer - 5%
32.    Smoothie maker - 5%
33.    Alarm clock - 4%
34.    Blender - 4%

…and how many people bother to read the manuals for these items:

1.    I don’t read manuals - 46%
2.    Mobile phone - 19%
3.    Washing machine - 17%
4.    Television - 16%
5.    Digital Camera - 14%
6.    Microwave - 11%
7.    Oven - 10%
8.    DVD player - 10%
9.    MP3 player - 9%
10.    Laptop - 9%
11.    Computer - 8%
12.    Printer - 8%
13.    TV remote control - 8%
14.    Broadband - 8%
15.    Telephone - 7%
16.    Tumble dryer - 6%
17.    Iron - 6%
18.    GPS navigation - 6%
19.    Camcorder - 6%
20.    Dishwasher - 6%
21.    Hi Fi system - 6%
22.    Scanner - 5%
23.    Freeview box - 5%
24.    Answer machine - 5%
25.    Alarm clock - 5%
26.    Modem - 5%
27.    Smoke alarm - 5%
28.    Clock Radio - 5%
29.    Games console - 5%
30.    Sky - 4%
31.    Digital TV - 4%
32.    Digital photo frame - 3%
33.    Electric timer - 2%

If you’re one of the thousands shunning holidaying abroad this summer, chances are you’ll be swanning around the UK instead. This being the case, we can all imagine how much fun the roads will be. And no road trip is complete without the “why can’t you read a map properly argument”. To ease the pain a little, we’ve gone through all the sat nav reviews on Reevoo to see if we can’t save you a few hours of sitting in traffic and some disagreements with your fellow travellers.

It was pretty clear that shoppers love TomToms. They nabbed four places out of the top five highest rated devices.

Here are the results:
1.    TomTom One GB V3 - £95
2.    TomTom ONE XL – £169
3.    Garmin Nuvi 760T - £210
4.    TomTom One Explore - £110
5.    TomTom ONE WE - £116

Reevoo sends review questionnaire emails to shoppers who have bought products from one of its retail partners. In the sat nav questionnaire, owners are asked to rate design, size, accuracy, value for money, ease of use and then give the product an overall rating. You can see all of the category results below.

For value for money, the TomTom One GB V3 is a pretty good all-rounder but shoppers rated the Garmin Nuvi as the most accurate sat nav of the bunch. It depends on your priorities but they all got very good reviews.

If you can’t see one you’re impressed with, you can see all of the other sat nav reviews here.

We hope you all have lovely holidays!

Unveiled at the British Motor Show this week was the waterproof, multi-use navigator from Garmin. The nüvi 500 is great news for cyclists, drivers, walkers, and folks in boats as it can customise itself to whichever form of travel you undertake.  It’s waterproof and built for adventure, providing turn-by-turn directions to get you when you want to be.

The different maps include TOPO for outdoor navigation and Blue Chart cartography for marine usage.  Boat fans can also add the optional BlueChart g2 Vision marine cartography, which will show them wrecks, port plans, inter tidal zones and other clever boaty things.

Walkers will also feel special as there’s a digital elevation map option, compass page and tracklog so that you can track where you’ve been - great for knowing who to blame when you get lost.

All the usual suspects are also onboard (sorry), such as Garmin’s “Where am I” feature, which tells you your exact coordinates, traffic avoidance and millions of points of interest.

You can also navigate by photos by using the “Connect Photos” option which will give you access to Google’s Panoramio.

This would be a great little device for people that want navigation for all their forms of travel.

The nüvi 500 has a 3.5 inch TFT screen, weighs 215g and has a battery life of 8 hours. It’s set to be released in the UK in September for £299.