You also get a nice selection of goodies in the box including a car mount, car charger, protective case, headphones, 2GB SD card with maps pre-loaded, USB cable, manual on CD and a DVD of the maps.

The 4.3" widescreen unit weighs only 210g and measures 132 x 91 x 22mm, the screen is coated in an anti glare coating which worked well during our tests as there was no visible glare even in direct sunlight.

Visibly the device has no outer buttons on the front except for an LED showing if the unit is charging. To the right is a shortcut button for your power and home key, at the base is the 3.5" headphone socket, reset hole and the USB port which is used by your car charger and data cable. The SD card fits snugly at the top of the unit.

Route 66' own software is installed and this offers a clutter free interface similar in style to TomTom's, with the screen going straight to the map view upon power-up and a press of the screen then reveals the menus, with large icons spread over several screens for adjusting various settings, something that you will need to do in order to get your device configured as you want to (e.g adding speed camera POI).

For inputting destinations Route66 offers a single screen for entry, you can input postcodes or address's but best of all it offers fuzzy searching, which means you can input parts of an address or a POI and the device will then search for the destination and display a list, though the list can be pretty large it normally highlights the closest match.

During testing the 8000 acquired a signal/our position pretty quickly and its routes were accurate - though they could have been a touch more efficient.

Our ploy of going the wrong way during a route did not seem to faze the 8000 one bit, routes were re-calculated quickly and each destination was spoken clearly. However you will not find text to speech options here, just standard 'turn left in 200 yards' messages.

The TMC option is not as standard on the 8000 but the software does support this - if or when you decide to upgrade.

When speed cameras appear you can get the 8000 to warn you in advance of an approaching camera and have it display a warning symbol with a corresponding noise, though we choose the car breaking sound effect which though funny can be distracting after a while, thankfully this is all customisable.

Map quality was basic but gets the job done, in both 2D and 3D modes. The usual directional aides can be displayed on-screen to aid with navigation.

We nearly forgot to mention that the maps were provided by NAVTEQ which will ensure accuracy.

Incidentally there is no Bluetooth support, so this will limit those who want hands free calling. You do have an MP3 player included which seems to have the standard gizmos found on most devices, music does sound ok from the supplied headphones.

What is cool is that when batteries start to run low on the device (it has a claimed battery life of under 5 hours)it only turns off the display and you can still get voice directions spoken, which allows you to continue driving until you can safely pull over and plug in the car adaptor.