The design of the new TomTom (TT) with its 4.5" widescreen display is very sleek and stylish indeed and on the whole at 220g is light enough to carry around with you.

The car cradle is also dinky and even though there is no clamp to lock the device onto the windscreen, the suction cup is mighty strong and was more than capable of holding up the TT during testing. However the only snag we could see was the TT being positioned close to the windscreen, as a result there was a reflection off the product which could be distracting to some, but none the less was not much of a burden.

There are no visible buttons to press on the unit except for the power on button at the top, so like other TT's everything is handled via its touch screen display.

On the base of the device you have the USB/Mains connector socket and an SD port, but the device incorporates its maps on 2GB of flash memory.

Once again the interface is a joy to use and it's so easy to navigate that newcomers should be able to pick up the device and plot a course in seconds.

Of course for veterans you will also notice a few new additions to the TT armour, one of the first is the voice recognition software. Unlike other manufactures that have this installed, you don't have to type in your address and then save it as a voice command, instead you can actually speak your destination in real time, for example you can verbally say your street name, post code, house number and then it plots your course. We have to say this works pretty well.

The new safety features use speech technology as well but before we come onto that we will tell you about the new Help Icon. When you enter this you can search nearby hospitals, doctors, breakdown recovery services and pharmacies that are in your area, there is also a British Red Cross guide which gives you graphical explanations on how to treat road side accidents and covers areas such mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, treat burns and shock.

We do feel that the above services are very useful but we believe them to work better in larger cities, as in our test area it said our nearest Pharmacy was 184m away in Dublin! (but we were using a pre-release version of the TTGo720, so hopefully this will improve with updates).

For a lot of the TT Plus services you need to pair your device wirelessly via a Bluetooth compatible phone and have an account setup via the TT website. Most of the services are free but services such as the Traffic and Speed camera updates will need to be paid for via subscription - though there is also a hardware TMC RDS receiver that can be purchased.

As mentioned early the speech technology extends to the safety features and with the Traffic service you now get spoken requests, asking if you want to divert to avoid traffic and you answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no' . You can even get the TT to read back any text messages you receive, which once again is another handy feature to aid with road safety as you never have to take your hands off the wheel.

As well as the 2D and 3D maps that are supplied by TeleaAtlas TT have released a unique feature that is available only on the new models. In a nutshell the mapfix technology allows you to manually adjust the maps with fixes such as misspellt roads or new roundabouts that could have been added. These adjustments can then be sent up to TT and shared with others, vice versa you can also download fixes from other users but there is an option to control what is sent to your device, so for example you can download only TT verified changes for peace of mind.