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Navigon 2100 Sat-Nav

It's always nice when the underdog wins. That's the beauty of watching sport, especially football's FA Cup - occasionally, just occasionally, a team of part-timers comes a long and bloodies the nose of one of the Premiership's big boys. Take Liverpool last year: when they came up against a Havant & Waterlooville, everyone said "Havant who?" and expected the Reds to run out easy winners. They did, in the end, but not before being given the fright of their lives. Havant took the lead twice in the first half, going 1-0 up through a Richard Pacquette header, before being pegged back, then edging in front once more through Alfie Potter before eventually losing 5-2.

That's what Navigon did recently with its 2110 Max. With an excellent mapping engine, simply superb lane assistance tool and all-round excellence, it bloodied the nose of TomTom's sat-navs to such an extent that we felt it deserved a Recommended award. Can the cheaper 2100 do the same?

The 2100 is essentially the bottom of the Navigon range. The maps are regional - just UK and Ireland included rather than the whole of Europe as with the 2110 Max - and the screen is a much smaller 3.5in compared to the 4.3in of the 2110 Max.

The main thing missing from this cheaper unit, however, is the wonderful Lane Assistant Pro. That means it doesn't provide minor road lane assistance, which is a shame, but you do still get standard lane assistance, which works well, indicating which lane you should take on motorways and A-roads.

Address entry is fiddlier too. Strangely, when entering addresses, the keyboard occupies just half the small screen, with the different elements of the address you need to fill in displayed on the left-hand side. It's a rather inefficient use of screen real estate and it makes entering addresses a lot more difficult than it should be. The 2110 Max had a full-screen keyboard and the 2100 would have benefited even more from the same approach.

It's immediately clear, then, that the Navigon 2100 is not quite the accomplished sat-nav that the 2110 Max is. But start using it and you'll discover there is more than meets the eye. It looks as good as its bigger brother, though, all clad in glossy black plastic, and it slips into a pocket much easier thanks to the smaller screen. And the Navigon 2100 also retains Navigon's trademark Reality View, which displays a static 'realistic' graphic of major motorway junctions before you arrive at them. I'd sooner turn this off, though, as I already know vaguely what a motorway junction looks like.

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