Now, the Google Maps app on the iPhone is well worth a doff of the cap to. I use it several times a day, plotting the fastest route to and from work depending on how grumpy the M3’s never-ending roadworks are feeling, or when navigating around an urban area on foot.

Google Maps usually works a treat, as it probably does for countless others, given it is a free app and half the world’s population seemingly has a smartphone or three. It has saved many, many hours of my life from sitting in traffic jams I could otherwise have been stuck in, and got me to where I need to go without a hitch.

All this makes you wonder what the point of the humble aftermarket sat-nav is nowadays. You know, those things you buy in Halfords for that one trip a year you think you’ll need it for, plug into the cigarette lighter and then try to stick to your windscreen every five minutes when that infuriating sucky thing doesn’t work.

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What’s more, they don’t fit in your pocket to use them on foot, and you only really hear about them these days from those local newspaper stories when a bloke got stuck in the middle of the farmer’s field on his way to the local garden centre as "he followed the sat-nav".

You may be able to tell that sat-navs and I never got on that well before; I always found they were slow and lacked intelligence (not unlike the user, ahem).

My real irritation with them comes from the one time I really blooming needed one. I was in the middle of Ukraine looking for a hotel in a town called Cherkasy and the sat-nav couldn’t find any satellites. And the sucky thing wouldn’t stick to the windscreen. About two hours later, after a military-style street-by-street search for the hotel, we found it, and the sat-nav was relegated to the glovebox for ever more.

But maybe things have changed in the sat-nav world since the summer of 2012 when I last picked one up. Step forward the TomTom Go 5100 and Garmin DriveSmart to see.

Nowadays, it seems, sat-navs are no longer just sat-navs. They’re more akin to smartphones without a call function with all sorts of ‘live’ functions and services, apps and, as with smartphones, a load of other stuff you’ll probably look at once and never use again.

The screens have also improved a great deal, the graphics clearer and faster-running, and when you touch something on the screen it actually responds - instead of the couple of seconds of delay you got on old sat-navs, which made you feel like you were making a phonecall to Australia.