As always lets start off by talking about what you get for your hard earned money, inside the box there is the Actis 3 unit which measures 90 x 82 x 21 millimetres (width x height x depth) and weighs 190g.

Then you have the supplied Mains adaptor, Car charger, SD card reader, Earphones, Car holder, DVD (with manuals, backup and desktop software) and you did get a 4GB SD card with pre-loaded software, we say did, because now looking on their website they have shrunk this down to 2GB.

On first inspections you can see that the Actis 3 is not a typical budget receiver, for a start the units 3.5” colour anti-glare screen is housed in a skin tight rubberised exterior which makes it both portable and durable. Plus along with its TomTom style menu interface you could believe you were using a more expensive product.

Like most SatNavs you get some multimedia functions thrown in, such as an MP3 and video player, with the added bonus of an EBook reader. For once thanks to the products size and weight you could pass the Actis 3 off as an MP3 player.

When it comes to navigating the new PC Navigator 7 software is used, along with European TeleAtlas maps with cross boarder routing.

On the whole the software worked well, it’s just a pity that our review version was still a touch buggy, with our saved destination sometimes getting corrupt and resulting in the software not loading, due to us turning off the device (during navigation) via the on/off switch at the side instead of at the top (though the updates on their website are designed to cure this and hopefully one of the other niggles we will mention latter in the review).

The initial start-up of the navigation software from the welcome screen does take a while to load, but you are then presented with a menu system that is similar to the style that TomTom use, for example there are several screens with largish icons for accessing the various screen options.

For the most part you can use your finger to type and navigate, but we did need to use the supplied stylus pen as inputting destinations was awkward without one.

Entering full address information is a touch long winded in our eyes as well, you have to enter everything in sequence so first you have to enter a country, your city, then your street and house number. The virtual egg-timer does pop up during this sequence, but thankfully it’s not enough to annoy you. Note: you can enter destinations via the map screen which does help to a certain degree.

You’re better off just entering a postcode but here we found one of the bugs we were mentioning earlier. We could not use this function primarily because as with the latter system of inputting destinations you have to enter a country first and as Great Britain was greyed out we could not enter any UK postcodes.

But at least you have the option of selecting a Qwerty keyboard, which is something that more expensive models do not include.

You also have your usual itinerary screens and routes can be planned also, but you have to do this via the desktop PC based software rather than the device itself, so this can get a touch annoying.

There is a nice little feature included with the software called ‘Odometer’, which like Navigons LogBook function can record your mileage, it’s not as advance as the afore mentioned system and we have our suspicions that is not as accurate, but potentially useful none the less.

When it came to navigating we had initial problems at the start with it taking well over ten minutes to lock onto our position (via its SiRF-Star III receiver). But this was apparently down to the fact that our review unit had already been used before hand in a different area - the SatNav acquisition can go a bit haywire you see - so a simple GPS reset was needed and as a result the acquisition time then went from over ten minutes to under a minute.

On the whole once we had a satellite lock we found the routes and re-route calculations were fairly quick but its routes could be more efficient.

It’s claimed battery life of 8hours is way out to be honest, as within an hour or so the full battery had drained to empty, but you can improve this by adjusting power save options via the setting menu.

The map detail is also sparse in 3D (2D was better) with a few street names here or there and the directional aids were a touch harder to see on the 3.5" non wide screen display.

Voice directions were clearly spoken via the back speaker, but there is no text-to-speech option, which is not a major shock due the products price and to be honest we rarely see this option in more expensive models either.

With the device you also get safety camera alerts with 6 months free updates, the latter is supplied by 'PocketGPS Worlds' 'POI-Warner' and as a result you will find the database is always well maintained and it’s a doddle to update as well - via the supplied USB cable (its a simple drag and drop procedure via 'My Computer' to update the database when needs be).

A 12 month subscription will set you back around £20 and we have to say it was worth it as during testing the camera alerts worked well.

There is no TMC unfortunately and the software does not support an optional interface either, so if the TMC is needed you will have to look elsewhere.