The guide + play GPS 500 is indeed lovely to look at, its silver finish goes really well with the upper black casing which houses an integrated antenna. It's also nice a light weighing 201g, which makes it pocket friendly.

The 4” display is essentially the only thing you see from the front, but to the sides there is a lock function to the left to stop the screen from being pressed and to the right you will find a job wheel for volume control and a 3.5” stereo headphone jack. Add these up and you can see where Harman’s direction seems to be heading, more towards the entertainment side rather the navigation experiance.

Inside the box you get a carry case, car charger, TMC aerial, cradle and mains charger, the Western, North and South European Maps are integrated within the units 2GB of flash memory.

When you turn on the guide+play for the first time the initial start menu is split into 'Plan a Trip' and 'Navigation settings' but the music and video portions are held under a small button called source.

On the whole harman/kardon has tried to simply everything as much as possible, it just takes a while to get your head around the menus if you have used either Mio or TomTom devices.

The music player ads a nice extra that is normally missing from other GPS devices, namely album art, this makes it easier to identify with your music. It's just a pity that the rest of the player falls short with simple basic controls, but we suppose you can at least play MP3, WMA and AAC music files.

The video player is just as basic as the above player but there is support for MPEG4 and WMV9 files.

Occasionally the music option would seem to lock up and a few other settings options would cause the device to not respond for a while and the unit had to be reset to get things working, but this never happened whilst driving thankfully.

As mentioned earlier harman/kardon have tried to simply your navigation experience as much as possible and they do this by including every option on the one screen, so once you have clicked on 'Plan a trip' you are greeted with the most common destination choices, such as search by postcode and Intersection for example.

After choosing your country/city – thankfully it remembers the choice for the next time – you can start to input your destination. Unlike TomTom you don’t get a Qwerty keypad so you have to switch between the numbers and letters screens, but when you start to press a letter it starts to grey out the letters it thinks are not needed to help speed up the input process.

All your POI and route simulations are still there but it seems to lack a dedicated route planner so in order to plan trips you have to add to your existing destinations from the map screen.

During tests we have to admit that screen was top quality, literally bringing the maps to life, it was sharp and clear plus there was no glare when the sun hit our windscreen.

The map detail was also good with your usual street names and directional aids at the top and sides of the screen. You also have a nifty button at the base of the screen which allows you to switch between different views quickly.

Our location was picked up quickly when outdoors but this was after leaving the device on for 5 minutes indoors (it did not pick up a signal indoors at all, but it seemed to speed up the process when we moved outside).

However on the whole the guide+play got us from A to B pretty accurately, but we did find on a few occasions that its route calculations were not as efficient as they could be, taking us down unnecessary roads to reach our destination. Its reroute recalculations were pretty quick mind.

Its just a pity the safety cameras did not work along our test route and later we realised what had caused this problem. Though the unit has the ability to handle speed cameras it has no software included as standard and as a result it points you to a 3rd party solution which we know well, called POI Warner. However we could not get the software to install on our review unit so the function became obsolete.

The supplied TMC function (used to avoid traffic hot spots) is a nice idea but in reality it did not work, it seemed to be scanning for frequencies but tended not to display any information.

There’s also no Bluetooth support for hands free calling which we feel should have been standard on a product costing around £345rrp.