Route Planner 2004 Great Britain and Europe is one of an increasing number of packages designed to help you find your way around. It includes detailed maps of European cities, giving the locations of sights, arts venues, hotels, petrol stations and so forth, along with the usual route planning.

Installation is straightforward, but it needs 2GB of disk space and the last stage of the setup took so long we thought it had died.

That minor glitch aside, it's simple to use. The main screen shows a map of Europe and there's a pane on the left where you can type in a postcode or town name. Place and street names can be selected from a pop-up box.

For the UK, this works fine; it worked well with addresses in the Amsterdam suburbs, too. But an address in Antwerp couldn't be found, since there was not enough detail for that city. And in Dublin, although the street we wanted was shown on the map, it couldn't be entered as a destination.

Curious. It suggests that if you require routes that take you off the beaten track in smaller cities, you may not get door-todoor with this product.

And, in common with many other packages, including Autoroute 2002, it suggested a road on our test route that has been closed for 20 years.

Once the information is found, creating routes is swift, and the map details include house numbers at junctions. A few clicks on the icons at the right of the screen add hotels, hospitals, zoos, casinos and other points of interest.

The Hotels tab produces information on places to stay within a selected distance of a location, including the information from the Varta guide and online booking for some UK hotels.

There's another useful touch in the settings screen - enter fuel consumption details and the route automatically includes a reminder to refuel; you can also include rest periods.

For the UK, there's live traffic information, which can be updated over the Internet and taken into account when route planning. Unfortunately the information doesn't extend to the rest of Europe, which is arguably where you may find it more useful, especially if you find it difficult to understand foreign radio bulletins.

The software integrates with GPS (global positioning system); for those who don't have this, maps and directions can be exported to Palm or Pocket PC handhelds. A viewer application is included, but in the Palm version we tested, it's not that exciting - the map isn't scaleable, the directions are just a text list, and the buttons in the application are in German. Still, it's a nice thought.

There's a good range of options for printing out routes. The standard printout includes a clear overview and a large map of the destination, along with step-by-step maps for each turn, and there are options for more detailed lists, or a simple overview.

There is one irritation, though, in that the direction information, both on screen and in the printout, often seems to relate to the next major town - not to what the road signs say. For instance, when driving through Hackney towards the Channel Tunnel, you're unlikely to see any signs for Sidcup.

Ultimately, it's the accumulation of some sloppy points that count against Route Planner 2004; individually, none is a show-stopper, but they combine to mar what would otherwise be a really useful piece of software.

Contact: Media Gold 020 7221 4600
www.dabs.com

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