Snooper Syrius S600 Plus Review

The makers of Snooper advertise their range as SatNav Speed Camera Locators. As with Road Angel, a sister site to Snooper incidentally, the emphasis is most definitely on searching out and alerting you to safety cameras. Their integrated Enigma database provides advance warning for a list of some 15 or more 'speed traps' and other hotspots which Snooper promise is updated daily. A couple of the smartest features on this are its ability to automatically mute any alerts if you are already approaching a camera at below the speed limit, and to automatically ignore cameras on the opposite carriageway.

There is a subscription for the update service - if you pay around £100 advance purchase you will receive downloads for life, otherwise you are looking at around £5 per month with the first six months free.

The unit itself is very sleek and stylish with a gloss black finish and an anti-reflective 4.3 inch colour touchscreen. The built in batteries have a life when fully charged of 4 hours, it is fully portable, plug and play and comes with a 2 year manufacturer's guarantee.

Navigation uses the latest SiRF III GPS chipset and map data is provided by Navteq which is probably the industry leader in digital mapping and Ordnance Survey™ data assists with postcode searching.

An extensive database of points of interest (POIs) will keep you informed of where to find petrol or lodging, turn by turn voice instructions are loud and clear and destination searching is by 8 digit postcodes.

The touchscreen is very responsive and the calculations are fast - the operating system used is Linux as opposed to Windows CE which seems to be the industry standard, and it is arguably this feature alone that keeps the speed up on the navigating.

Bluetooth connectivity comes included in the package for hands free telephone calls. It is unusual to find the Bluetooth feature built-in when an MP3 player is not, but many people now own a regular player or iPod to fill in that gap so nothing lost there.

On a test by Which Car magazine, the Snooper Syrius S600 Plus got high marks in its operation and visual and audio alerts and directions. It did not win their best category award though because the mounting cradle they had was so poorly designed. This may have been a bad example, and in all other areas the unit worked really well.

As a sat nav you will be buying a very nice looking and functional unit, but as stated previously it is not sold purely for navigation but for camera alerts too. The importance of this feature to Snooper is almost their reason for existence, but with this attention to detail for on the road snags and blackspots, it comes as a surprise that TMC is not included as well. For the extra £10 a Mio C520t has it all and would probably be a better investment in the long run.