Well, first there was the all important update. Our European maps are good in London and Paris, but no good in London, Ohio or Paris, Texas. Thankfully, TomTom makes it easy to get your hands on the latest geographic information over the internet.

Splashing out £59.95 gets you full American access and the maps are added to your TomTom Home online account. Connect the satnav to your internet-enabled PC using the USB dock and the updates can be automatically installed. Our Go 730 unit only had a few hundred megabytes of space remaining so we popped in a SanDisk 2GB SD memory card to store our new routes.

So, what did we get for our time and money? Well, a few invaluable services, as it happens. As we mentioned in the main review for the device, the Go 730 has an excellent search function that can track down nearby points of interest (POI). This came in extremely useful when we were caught in a blizzard in Minneapolis and needed to find a petrol station in a hurry or risk running out of gas at the worst time.

The same POI service also includes such invaluable services as pharmacies and general stores (as these are sometimes not as obvious to track down as you might think on the road). However, our favourite search allowed us to access a database of motels and hotels that made it very easy to drive around an area and check the prices. Skip this function and you risk accidentally turning onto the freeway again and leaving all those motels behind.

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This review was posted using the IPassConnect global wireless and US 3G service. For more details visit the iPass website.