Product Reviews

The Autoroute duet has become established as a flagship multimedia title for Microsoft over the last couple of years, and the emergence of new editions of both the Great Britain and Europe versions for 1998 comes as no surprise. The market for route planners is getting crowded these days, with a clutch of products hovering around the £50 mark all vying for your eye. Microsoft's response to the competition has been centred largely on improving the look and feel rather than adding new features, although a major innovation this year is the addition of GPS support.

Although Microsoft is keen to market Autoroute to both business and home users, it's clearly best suited to the latter for whom its functionality as an aid to planning holidays is now firmly established through a large database of tourist information. In the Great Britain edition, the database has more than 4,200 entries, including accommodation, golf courses, cricket grounds, campsites, historic sites, leisure centres, museums, nature sites, ski slopes, tourist information offices and 900 Les Routiers eateries. The Europe edition offers 11,000 hotels, campsites, restaurants and other attractions, as well as further features like phrase books for 12 languages, and handy information on travelling to each country. The information about entertainment and accommodation includes helpful details like opening times and entry fees, as well as brief tourist guide descriptions.

You can overlay these attractions onto maps, where they appear as clickable symbols, and use them as stopping off points in a journey. Autoroute can be instructed to find only sites that lie within a given radius of a set location, up to a maximum of 50 miles. When I selected all the categories of attraction within

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a ten mile radius from my home on the outskirts of London, 516 possibilities were found. This is impressive, though a number of tourist attractions weren't listed. It's also worth noting that the GB version omits Northern Ireland entirely, but it's included on the European disc.

As an alternative to working with the map, the database of attractions can be accessed via a separate feature called the Travel Guide. This provides information on a regional basis and adds more text, such as short essays on national cuisine, some of which are of dubious value. However, the Travel Guide interface, with its hotlinks between attractions is a reasonable way of assembling ideas for a holiday.

Once you find a location of interest using either the Travel Guide or map overlays, you can add it to an existing route with the click of a button. Within the Travel Guide, you'll find Web links which launch an on-line session and take you to a range of approved Web sites. Microsoft also promises a new on-line feature, the Expedia travel service, which will allow users to make bookings via the Internet.

You can plan a route by using a Wizard that also provides access to your personal driver's profile. Alternatively, start and end locations and stopping off points can be set from the map, and calculations made by using the right mouse button.

Calculation speeds are vastly improved over the 1997 edition. This is achieved, in part, by having calculation begin as a background task and by a general tightening of the code. I found that even the most complex routes across Britain were calculated in seconds, rather than the minutes they took with the 1997 version.

Despite this, the 1998 editions of Autoroute Great Britain and Europe don't offer any major improvements over last year's models. The information has been updated, though there are still considerable gaps in the range of tourist sites covered. And although the interface has been cleaned up and the speed of calculation has been improved, these are tweaks rather than groundbreaking changes.

All in all, the new versions are better products than before, but unless existing users need access to the very latest road maps and tourist information, they could be forgiven for not making the decision to upgrade this year, even though they stand to get a £10 discount.