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Admit it. You've always wanted the protection of a masked avenger on horseback. Presumably, that's the kind of assistance the excitingly named ZorroGPS hopes to provide. Zorro fought for the downtrodden against tyranny, and ZorroGPS aims to bring satellite navigation to the masses, primarily via their smartphones, although the company also makes standalone sat-nav devices and GPS models intended for hiking.

The ZorroGPS smartphone software is the company's most significant product, however. Where its standalone devices are merely competitively priced, its software slices the competition down to size with a swish of its rapier. If you just want navigation in England, you can pick up the basic version of ZorroGPS for an incredible £16. The whole of the UK and Ireland costs a mere £2 more, and Western Europe is only £28. The US costs £23, Canada £17, and you can get the entire North American continent including Mexico for £35. Only the UK maps were available at the time of review, however.

You would expect ZorroGPS to have cut corners to achieve its despot-slaying price. But the economisation isn't in the map data. ZorroGPS has recently updated its software with the latest NAVTEQ maps, from March 2009. However, a number of the widgets included as standard in other manufacturers' software are optional extras with ZorroGPS. Alerts for speed limits and other road sign warnings cost £3. Lane Assistance, including notification of traffic lights and stop signs, requires another £4. If you want speed camera alerts, that's an additional £5.

A further £3 gets you 'Day & Night route', the title of which is a little misleading. This is actually similar to TomTom's IQ Routes, calculating journeys based on real traffic rates rather than speed limits or shortest distance, taking into account time of day and statistical traffic information for each road. If you want detailed petrol station and fuel pricing, that's £3 extra, too, and an extended POI database is £4.

Add all this together and you get a total of £40 for UK and Ireland maps with all the bells and whistles. This is still very competitive, however, and if you just want sat-nav on your mobile for occasional use, you could probably make do with the basic version, with one or two extras. So ZorroGPS clearly is extremely good value, and there's a 48-hour demo download version available if you want to try it out first. Purchases are online downloads as well, specific to a small selection of mobile phones, and we tried the software on a HTC Touch Diamond. However, all the supported phones run Windows Mobile 6.1, so it's likely any handset using this operating system or later will be compatible.

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