Viamichelin Road Atlas 2002/2003

Michelin has released its answer to your route planning needs. As with all its competitors, Michelin is well aware that, while route planning is core to this sort of product, it's the additional utilities that make it an attractive alternative to standard print-based maps.

The Viamichelin product certainly uses the company's expertise, and offers details of Michelin-starred restaurants across the nation.

To keep things fair, we tested the Road Atlas in the same way as AA Milemaster and Microsoft Auto Route. We entered a particular route into the route planning wizard and immediately hit difficulties.

The results were very disappointing, as not only did the software have trouble finding the street we were looking for, but it also struggled even to find the town.

This made route planning a more tedious task than ever before. However, we did finally get a rough idea of the route we wanted, and could calculate our speeds and fuel consumption in km.

The interface seems a little complicated when compared to a normal printed atlas. The driving directions are pretty basic, but the general set-up is not very user-friendly. The maps do look fantastic, but their exceptional quality is in direct contrast with the look and feel of the rest of the software.

It seems that Michelin has concentrated so hard on reproducing the printed maps digitally that it has ignored the product's primary purpose: giving directions. The real shortfall was the lack of detail with which you could pin down your route.

The restaurant feature is a good idea, but unless the route planning aspects of Road Atlas improve in later versions, it won't be making it into our shopping baskets.

DETAILS
Price: £29.99 (£25.52 ex VAT)

Contact: Viamichelin

System requirements:

• 200MHz processor
• 32MB of Ram
• 200MB of free hard disk space
• Eight-speed CD-Rom
• Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, NT4 or 2000

See also:

Microsoft Autoroute 2003 vs Map & Travel Route Planner 2003

You'll never get lost with these two route planners, but which is best?  07 Mar 2003

Microsoft MapPoint 2002 European Edition

For plotting location-based business data onto maps.  08 May 2002

Microsoft MapPoint 2002 Europe

An essential geographical information system that no sales rep should be without.  01 Aug 2001

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