With established brands like TomTom, Mio and Garmin churning out featured-packed navigators with wanton abandon, it's a little surprising to see a company that's relatively inexperienced in this sector trying to get involved. HP certainly isn't the first name you'd think of when it comes to GPS, and in labelling its effort the iPAQ 314 Travel Companion it's not immediately obvious that this is the intended market.

The device is attractively designed with a gunmetal finish and a slim and light build, and comes supplied with a car kit, AC charger and a leather carry case. When you start it up you'll be able to choose your entertainment; namely video, music or photo playback and a range of supplied games.

You can upload your Outlook contacts to the device to use with the Bluetooth support for hands-free calling, and extras like a clock, calculator and calendar are handy additions. The bulk of the functionality is obviously centred on navigation, and we must admit to being a little sceptical about HP's prowess in this area considering the range of capable alternatives from more established rivals.

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How wrong we were. The interface of the iPAQ is superbly well designed and offers easy access to route planning, points of interest and favourite locations. You can plan a journey by entering a full postcode or address, or alternatively navigate to a city centre if you just want to be pointed in the right direction.

Once up and running the map view is extremely clear, with information bars at the top and bottom displaying details of the current route, time and distance to destination and access to features like volume adjustment, the MP3 player and Bluetooth calling.

Both visual and audible prompts are clear, with upcoming turns shown in a separate window and text-to-voice support for reading out road names and destinations for added clarity. Route calculations and recalculations are fast and accurate, and there's an impressive array of options for tweaking settings and editing and adjusting the planned route.

The iPAQ 314 is also one of the most impressive we've seen for adjusting the map view. The scroll wheel on the side allows you to zoom from 3,000 meters to street level and, if you tap the screen, you'll find the display changes to show zoom, elevation, panning and 2D/3D controls. Tapping and dragging scrolls around the map and thanks to the powerful 600Mhz processor all of these functions are smooth and responsive, making it a true joy to use on the road.

The iPAQ isn't just about navigation, though, and while we've seen extras such as media playback on rival devices, we were particularly impressed by the format support and accessibility of these applications here. Since all of the Western European maps are stored on the 2GB of internal memory, the SD card slot on the side is free for you to use to store media content such as music, video and photos.

Plug a card in and the device automatically searches for media and displays it in the relevant application. Impressively, MP3 files are sorted by ID3tags and it's easy to set music playing while you switch to navigation mode for directions on the road. Disappointingly there's no FM transmitter built in, so if the fairly capable internal speaker isn't loud enough your only option is to connect the device to your car stereo through the headphones port using a cassette adaptor or 3.5mm jack cable.

The video player is capable and managed to handle the AVI and MPG format files we tested without requiring them to be re-encoded, and the photo viewer can use a range of transitions to display pictures in a slideshow mode.

You'll also find five games built in, most of which are pretty playable and graphically impressive on the colourful, clear 4.3-inch display.

We have to admit to being surprised at the consistently excellent performance of the iPAQ. It's accurate and easy to use on the road, with an impressive degree of control and some of the most effective media playback facilities we've seen on a sat-nav. Best of all it's well priced; currently you can pick one up for a little over £200, which is fantastic value for money. Admittedly it's not quite up to TomTom's high standards, but from a price to performance point of view the HP iPAQ 314 is one of the most capable GPS devices on the market.