Route Planner Great Britain for Palm OS & Pocket PC 2002

Route Planner Great Britain for Palm OS & Pocket PC 2002 provides the maps and directions for navigating inside any town or city in Great Britain when you really need them--out and about, away from your computer. As you tap in a name, Route Planner shows a list of all the matching streets or places. You can navigate from one landmark to another or to a street and get turn-by-turn directions as well as a highlighted route on the map. And if you've got a GPS receiver you can use that to see where you are on your route.

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