There has been a lot of reported vehicle break-ins with satellite navigations units stolen from the vehicles. This I will say is partly due to the growing popularity of satellite navigation units.

A lot of the owners leave the windscreen mounts of these devices attached to the windscreen when they detach the units, this is a give away signal that leads to the vehicle being broken into with the vandal looking for the device in the dashboard.

My solution is simple, get a windows or symbian smartphone, that is compatible with a navigation software and use that for your navigational needs. These smartphones are really getting smarter, you would want to look for a series 60, 80, or 90 symbian phone or any windows powered mobile phone. Bluetooth functionality is a prerequisite as that is what is used to connect to mobile phone to the portable bluetooth gps receiver. Get yourself a compact buetooth gps unit like the holux gpslim 236, that is currently the smallest unit and you are done.

Before you talk about screen size, I will say the screen size isn't that bad at all from experience. Most smartphones have enough screen display size to do the gps justice. There are a lot of advantages to this setup. One thing I will say is I have never heard of a car being broken into because of a phone cradle in sight but leave a gps cradle in sight and you could be asking for trouble.

In the United Kingdom you can get a free contract smartphone like the nokia 6630/6680 and alternatively if windows is your thing you can get an orange spv c500/c550/c600 or the t-mobile variants, you can get a navigation software with a bluetooth gps receiver for less than ?200 and you are good to go.

Francis Ononye writes about satellite navigation