In-car software for the mobile Psioneer
By Steve Litchfield, May 21st 1996
By Steve Litchfield, May 21st 1996
Crunch time. I took all the programs out on the road to see how they perform in real life. Read on ...
Sitting in my car in Woodley, with my sights set on Marlow, I turned first to Mapper-3a. It informed me that Marlow was 12.2 miles away and although not showing all the A roads in the area, showed enough to suggest that the A4 followed by the A404 would be a good choice of route. It also helpfully showed a couple of National Trust sites of interest, with phone numbers, and the frequency of the local radio station (Radio Berkshire) for up-to-the-minute travel advice. I asked Mapper-3a for a town plan of Marlow but there wasn't one available (only the 200 largest towns/cities in Mapper-3a have town plans in this version).
Plugging in my Garmin GPS 45, and activating the Moving Map function, a large cross appeared on the map showing current position. By pressing TAB and making Marlow the first selected item, Mapper-3a was then giving me Estimated Time of Arrival to Marlow, a feature which I just love, as you can tell at a glance throughout your journey whether you're running late or not and make appropriate adjustments.
Closing Mapper-3a down, I started up Autoroute Express. First hurdle was that Woodley wasn't in Autoroute's database, and I couldn't add it because you can't add your own places ... grrrr ... so I selected Reading itself as the start point. Autoroute then gave me its best route via the M4, calculated as 24 miles! Luckily, it does allow you to change your route preferences, but even with A roads set as a preference, it still could only give me a 17 mile route via the A4155. To its credit, the extra road detail (compared to Mapper-3a) would be very useful were I to get lost or to venture in areas that Mapper-3a covered more sparsely. It's a great pity that Microsoft/Nextbase couldn't squeeze in the facility to add places (e.g. villages) to its main database or even any of the extra databases and overlays, as the bare road map seems a little 'flat' without some kind of extra information.
Next it was time to start up AutoGPS. I verified that it could talk to the GPS and thus knew where I was (see the screen shot) and that it could happily drive Autoroute's cursor. Autoroute has a much higher resolution than Mapper-3a's 1km grid, and so the locator cross always seems to be exactly on a road. In comparison, Mapper-3a's cross tends to wander either side of the highway!
For the first leg of my journey I decided to close Autoroute down and run Findit instead, as I'd only used this very briefly in the past, for review purposes, and never as a serious traveller. Findit's main screen requires the user to make a choice firstly what destination to count down to and then whether to display towns, road junctions, fast food places or filling stations.
Having set "Marlow" as the destination, it shows up in a good large font on the left of the screen. Positioning Ltd are to be congratulated on the user interface, the combination of large fonts, clear arrows and very simple 'one key-press' operation makes it a joy to use in comparison to Autoroute or Mapper-3a.
Driving along with the program chugging away beside me I soon came to several conclusions. Firstly, the fast food database was rather pointless, as all it effectively did was point in the direction of the nearest town! For the traveller, Mapper-3a's Little Chef and Happy Eater overlays would, I think, be much more relevant. Apparently it's possible to order extra databases from Positioning Ltd, including 'Restaurants'. So as long as you don't mind forking out a little extra you can have Little Chefs etc. in Findit as well!