Now we have to say that POIs have never been TomTom’s strong suit. It’s far too reliant on fast food chains when it comes to finding restaurants in your vicinity for example, and isn’t great at finding tourist destinations. For instance a search for zoos in the Bristol area says the nearest one is 22.5 miles away when a) there’s one in the city centre suburb of Clifton, and b) there's another just a couple of miles away from that. Searching for the POI by name reveals that our non-existent city centre zoo has a car park.

Going someway to make amends is a new Help Me! function in the TomTom which automatically directs you to your nearest police station, fire station, doctors, hospital, etc - handy in the event of an emergency. You can also use the TomTom Home software to download POIs submitted by other drivers. Want to take your date out for dinner in Derby? Someone will probably have recommended a place you can go see. It would be nice if this functionality was included by default however.

The cost of ownership

The other downer, of course, is that forking out over £290 for a TomTom Go 920 T isn’t the last time you’ll be called on to fetch your wallet from your pocket for the device. You’ll also have to take out annual subscriptions for speed camera updates, traffic, weather... the list goes on. TomTom isn't alone in this, of course - rivals like Garmin also charge for extra services and updated maps too.

We’re also less than enamoured by another Apple-esque trait - making you pay for accessories that used to be included by default in the box. You’d expect that for £350 the 920 T would also come with some kind of case to protect your investment when it’s away from the car. Not so. You do get a USB docking station, for synchronising with your PC however - something older models never had.

Another thing we’d definitely change is the TomTom Go 920 T’s windscreen mount. Users on the web complain that the mount often falls off - something we experienced at least three times during our test. Thankfully the 920 T escaped unscathed - but it didn't do much for our concentration.

One solution is to clean the inside of your windscreen thoroughly every time you attach the mount, but that’s not very practical; we prefer the mounts TomTom used to ship for devices, like the TomTom Go 700. These were more substantial affairs that locked solidly onto the screen - although even these were prone to leaving the plastic sucker on your car window when trying to prise it off at the end of your journey.

So should you buy the TomTom Go 920 T? Well that depends on a) how often you plan to drive to California, and b) whether you’ve lost, broken or got bored of your existing satnav already. For most of us the answer is likely to be a) never and b) no. For the rest, the TomTom Go 920 T builds incrementally on what has gone before - and that is a good thing if getting from A to B is your top priority - all of TomTom’s Go products deliver very good results.

We feel that features like MapShare and text-to-speech are genuine must-haves, and fill neat gaps in the TomTom’s largely flawless delivery.

If the company can solve the other minor issues we’ve raised here, then its next-gen products (available this summer) could prove unassailable. From what we’ve seen from the 920 T, TomTom is very nearly there.