Well, I went out and tried this program on the road. Loaded it up on my laptop, stuck the GPS mouse (BU-303) on the roof and loaded on somewhere that I wanted to go.
Now, I'm in Europe so it is difficult to say if the U.S. is different or better. However, I'm very familiar with Routis 2004, so I'll compare with that.
First off, the program found my street no problem but for some reason, doesn't allow addresses. Hrmm... OK. So, I plugged in something fairly close to me, and something fairly close to my destination. I found the search/ keyword feature to be very slow for some reason. I tried on both my desktop and laptop and it seemed to lock up things for a few seconds. Finding my street, for example, the computer waited about 30 seconds to find it. Not sure if there was a problem, I hit ctrl-alt-delete and it said "Not Responding", but several seconds later, the name of my street popped up.
I didn't find it at all easy or intuitive to put in addresses of destinations. So, if you use this... figure it out and plug all the info in, BEFORE you leave home.
So, off I go. It accepted my GPS mouse just fine. Funny enough, in the GPS Status window, it showed I had about 5-7 sats, but it also said the status of my GPS (NO GPS). But it was working so I ignored it.
The maps are decent. Not the best, not the worst. Seems like everything is easy to read. I didn't change the font settings or anything. When approaching your upcoming street, it beeps and a LARGE banner across the top tells you what street, which way to turn and how far. There were no voice given directions. At least that I heard, and I had the volume up on my laptop. There is something that I saw about "voice 1" and "voice 2" and it had different speeds. Maybe that's to tell you you are speeding. Didn't get up that fast to try. The little car (you) moves across the map, but the map doesn't move at all. The car can be changed to another symbol.
As far as the route it choose. I choose a destination that I normally drive every day. It seem to go the same or similar ways that I would go. I purposely went off course and drove the opposite direction from my destination on a parellel street. It took a long time to realize and re-route. Then when it re-routed, it simply pointed me in the opposite direction of where I was going. Instead of coming up with something clever like taking a right at the next street and then another right.
This program is not very touch-screen friendly. Although I didn't use a touchscreen, I can't imagine handling a car and that at the same time.
Overall. It works. It gets the job done. But there are far better programs to do the same. I do like the fact that it has maps in the U.S. AND Europe. Something other programs don't do. People in the U.S., I don't know if it displays in meters or feet, but this only displays in metric. Which is fine, as I know metric very well, but my native system is to use feet and miles. Didn't find a way to change it.
OK.. there's my review.
Linear Mode
