Route Planner Great Britain for Palm OS & Pocket PC 2002

The first step is to create a map of the area you're visiting, by picking a town or postcode. Then you add key addresses. Irritatingly, there's no way to import from your contact manager or to link to another program like Outlook: you have to type in addresses you want to see on the map by hand. They show up as symbols along with points of interest (public buildings, museums and other landmarks), restaurants, railway stations, garages, service stations and car parks. When you transfer the map to your PDA you can tap to see what a symbol is for or tap and hold for the address and phone number. The name stays on screen until you tap another symbol or a road. If you find them distracting, you can turn any of them off, so you can see your addresses and car information and none of the others if you prefer. Depending on the zoom you choose you'll see some or all of the road names and you can search for a street or any of the points of interest, but more usefully you can find a route between two places, with driving or walking directions.

The directions aren't always perfect but combined with the highlighted route and the landmarks Route Planner is a very good way of navigating around a town. The maps don't take up much space (100 K to about 1 MB depending on the area) so you can keep quite a few on most PDAs. With Route Planner Great Britain for Palm OS & Pocket PC 2002 there's a good chance you'll never get lost again. --Mary Branscombe

You need to install the main map utility on your PC's hard drive. This is fine, it's easy to set up. Then you have to choose locations, such as your home, Uncle Pete's house or that chalet in Norfolk you sometimes go to on a rainy weekend. This is where the problems start, because even though you're doing this on your PC (mine's a new laptop, 1 month old with 1.3Ghz processor so it's hardly ancient) zooming in on the map is painfully slow. And considering the map is sitting on your hard drive, there's no reason why it should this way.

Then you can select maps of towns and cities that you want to access on your Palm. This can be the whole town or just certain areas, such as the centre of Luton. You can choose to have restaurants, entertainment and travel points (eg, rail stations) marked on the map. Obviously the greater the area you want, the more space it will eat up on your Palm. But again, zooming in and moving around the map is incredibly slow. It's a chore.

So now you're done. You've selected your favourite places and the maps of towns and cities you'll need to access. Whip 'em over to your Palm and try and calculate a route.

You'll be waiting awhile. I live on the outskirts of Luton, as do my parents, with the distance between us being 5.5 miles. I'm sad. I checked. Having said that, it's quite easy to get to my parent's house as there are basically only three long main roads you need to use. But after waiting for over 5 minutes for the software to calculate the 5 mile route, I gave up. I could have been halfway there in that time.

I did manage to calculate a road to a closer destination (ie, less than a mile away) Even then, I couldn't specify house numbers, only road names and/or preset destinations. It gets worse. Let's say you're going from Road A to Road B. Rather than simply calculate the route to the point where you enter Road B, it will calculate a route to the *very end* of that road, thereby adding more to the distance than is necessary.

If you were to ask me if I'm disappointed in the software, I'd say no, I'm appalled. I'm amazed they had the guts to put it on the market. I'd be embarrassed. This isn't any kind of routing software at all - if you're lucky, you *might* be able to get a route from A to B within a town you have the map installed for on your Palm. But only if it's relatively close by (ie, less than 5 miles)

The only thing it's good for is having a searchable map of the towns / cities of your choice. I'd still say you're better off with a map...


Not really a route planner   October 18, 2002
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

At £14.99, this isn't really bad value for money as such, but what it isn't is a worthwhile route planner. The basic UK map has too few towns and the directions are very limited. An indication of journey time is one handy feature that it lacks. I haven't tried loading city maps and it may come into its own more then.

If you want a PDA route planner that works, try the Tom Tom Route Planner, which is about £40. They also do City maps for about the same price, so if you mostly travel between towns and only occasionally want directions within them, then these two products probably sit quite well side by side.

If you get "Unprecise route", reset the PDA, which seems to be something you need to do on a regualar basis with Pocket PC 2002 anyway.

1 out of 10, could try harder, but that's the story with a lot of routeing software. Tom Tom and the AA products seem to be the best of a not very good bunch, but the original Nextbase Autoroute was the best!


Not the AtoZ   June 20, 2002
22 out of 22 found this review helpful

I was hoping that this programme would replace the paper London AtoZ that I currently carry around with me. However Route Planner falls short in a number of areas: 1) I found I could not put the whole of Greater London onto one map since the file would be too large - I had to break London down into smaller areas. 2)If the area covered is large the file takes a long time to load. 3) I still can't get over the idea that a map of London doesn't show tube stations or the Thames - but does identify the Chartered Insurance Museum! 4)Using the route planner I often get an error message saying "unprecise route data". If I cannot correct this, the cancel button doesn't seem to work and I have to reset my Ipaq. 5) The selection of cinemas and shops which are identified is not at all comprehensive. 6) The town maps do not place very much emphasis on major roads vs minor ones so I find it difficult to recognise the road network I am looking at.

Having said all that the search feature is good and enables me to quickly locate an address - it's just a pity I cannot locate the nearest tube station and work out a route from it. If you travel a lot around the UK the ability to load up street maps in advance is will be very useful but without railway lines, rivers and coastal features it can still be hard to navigate!


It worked fine with me!   April 10, 2002
8 out of 11 found this review helpful

I have a Pocket PC so I can't really comment on the Palm, but it worked great with my Compaq iPAQ. Installation was smooth and I could choose how much detail I wanted on the maps before downloading them. I usually use an A to Z in London but I had to go on business to Oxford and without this product I would never have been able to find my way around the city so easily! I will probably stop using the A to Z now and just keep the London map on my Pocket PC.