Map and Guide Routeplanner 2004

Routeplanner 2004 Great Britain and Europe is one of a growing number of packages designed to help you find your way around. It includes detailed maps of cities all over Europe, with sights, arts venues, hotels, petrol stations and so forth, along with the usual route planning.

Installation is straightforward, but you do need 2GB of disk space on which to load the two CDs - and the last stage of setup took so long we thought it had died and so just started the program manually.

That minor glitch aside, it's very simple to use. The main screen shows a map of Europe and a pane on the left where you can type in a postcode or town name. A box pops up allowing you select the exact place from a list, and then below you can do the same with the street name.

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-to-door with this product. And, in common with many other packages, including Autoroute 2002, it suggested on a test route that we use a road that has been closed for 20 years.

Where the information is found, creating routes is quite swift, and the map details include house numbers by junctions, helping you to work out exactly which way to go. A few clicks on the icons at the right of the screen will add hotels, hospitals, zoos, casinos and plenty of other points of interest to the map, should you want to see them.

You can then click a Hotels tab at the top of the screen and search a place to stay within a selected distance of a location, reviewing the information from the Varta guide, with online booking offered for some UK hotels. That can make it a very useful tool for the traveller; for hotels and other points of information, double-clicking will often provide information that includes a phone number. There's another useful touch in the settings screen, where you can enter fuel consumption details, and your route will automatically include a reminder to refuel at certain points; similarly you can include rest periods as well.

Within the UK, there's live traffic information, which can be updated over the Internet, and taken account of in 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 don't understand the language spoken in foreign radio bulletins.

If you do take the software on the road, you'll find it integrates with GPS (global positioning satellite); for those who don't, you can export maps and directions to Palm or PocketPC handhelds. A viewer application is included, but in the Palm version we tested, it's not that exciting - the map isn't scalable, 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 when you want to print out a route. The standard printout includes a clear overview and a large map of the destination, along with step-by-step maps for each turn. You can also opt for more detailed lists, or a simple overview. There is one irritation, though, the direction information that appears, both on screen and in the printout, often seems to relate to the next major town - not to what the roadsigns say on your present direction. 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 Routeplanner 2004; none is individually a show-stopper, but they combine to mar what would otherwise be a really useful piece of software.

Contact: Map & Guide
www.mapandguide.com
Media Gold 020 7221 4600

System requirements:

• Windows 98 or higher
• Pentium processor
• 64MB Ram
• 2GB disk space