This wee beastie is the Sony NV-U50 in-car sat-nav system, which would be brilliant if it weren’t for one teeny-weeny problem: some of the map data is out of date, particularly in Southern Ireland and parts of the West of Scotland.

Sat-nav without up-to-date map data isn’t ideal. It means encountering huge scary roundabouts that the sat-nav doesn’t know about, or discovering that the sat-nav thinks you’ve gone off-road when you’re pootling along a dual carriageway. I mailed Sony to moan, and they say:

While there are no updates at present, there are plans to release these in DVD format in the near future. This has been tentatively arranged for August/September. These maps are currently under development by Navtech.

No indication of whether those updates will be free, mind you. I suspect not.