AA Route Planner 2008
By D Dunbar in Software. May 13, 2009
Since Autoroute 2007 is beginning to look dated now and with no plans in the pipeline for a 2009 update it seems, we're desperately looking for an alternative to our favourite route-planner but does AA Route Planner 2008 take off from where Autoroute 2007 left off?
AA Route Planner 2008
The AA blurb states it has "the most up-to-date maps" and goes on "this town-to-town program offers you the quickest and easiest way to find the best route for any journey." Immediately 'Town to town' jumps out as sounding a little odd to me and maybe hints at AA's inadequacies. I give it a quick test and sure enough AA Route Planner 2008 fails to find slightly off-the-beaten-track locations.
It does the basics though, just. The manual again boasting of point and click start/destination for creating a journey, saving journeys, reversing the route, multi zoom and panning -- these features are surely expected of any route planner and are hardly anything to write home about .
There's nothing of note here with AA Route Planner. What it does do is slow, basic and shoddy. In particular road names are extremely hard to read without first zooming right in - it'd be nice if I can see my journey zoomed out and still read road names.The only thing going for it is that it's fairly cheap, less than £15 (compared to around the £40 mark for Microsoft's Autoroute)and it does do the basics I suppose. The maps are up-to-date but it fails to find out of the way locations.
In all, it's nothing like an Autoroute replacement and probably only barely useful for the few of us that haven't yet succumbed to in car Sat Nav. Stick to Autoroute 2007 and fingers crossed there'll be updates otherwise there's always those AA roadmaps at petrol stations.
Related Articles : Microsoft Autoroute 2007, Memory-Map Review
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