Introduction

The company Route 66 from the Netherlands has recently upgraded their series of routeplanners and has come up with the name Route 2000. Reviewed was Route 2000 Benelux, scaled to streetlevel.

The main reason of my interest in this product was GPS Support. Where other products targeted for the Netherlands allow the user to select coordinates as method for input/output, Route 2000 actively supports a GPS receiver connected to your PC. The product allows you to plan a route on your PC and print maps and directions. When combined with a laptop and a GPS it will show you where you are.

At home or office

So much for theory, but how does Route 66 work in practice? Well for starters the installation of Route 66 Europe asks for 200 MB free hard disk space minimum, even when you leave as much data on the CD-Rom as possible. It also asked a lot of my patience when tested on a laptop with a Pentium 166 MHz processor. You are best advised not to go below 300 MHz and a decent graphics card.

You plan your trip by defining start and end, which can be of the form a street, postal code or a point of special interest. Take for example the other day, when I had to go from my office in Rijswijk to a conference center in Amsterdam. I only had to type 'Irenelaan, Rijswijk' and 'Amstelborgh' respectively and select from a dropdown list. See also the left part of the screen in image 1.

On the road.

Afterwards I usually switch to a view whereby the screen is less cluttered, and shows map and direction only. The Garmin © GPS receiver was switched to NMEA 0183 output and hooked up with a cable through the serial port. A window shows status of the GPS with your position, speed and distance to your chosen routepoint. When asked to do so [checkbox] it also centers the screen automatically, thus showing you on the map where you are.

When moving, a red cross changes into a black arrow showing you the way to go. It has the same function as the arrow found on the screen of your GPS, thus only showing your direction 'as the crow flies'.

The software has no capability to upload routes or routepoints to your GPS. It can not upload maps either.

When calculating the fastest route it does incorporate roadblocks or traffic-jams, information which it gets from the company's own webserver (http://www.route66.nl/). In my opinion this is a real reason for mobile connections to the Internet.

IMPORTANT: Traffic Information is currently only available for the Benelux and Germany products. Other European countries may follow in the future.

The requirements for these products in the case of MS-Windows are:

Minimum: 486 processor 120 MHz, 32 MB RAM, 70 MB hard disk space; CD-Rom drive.

Recommended: Pentium 300 MHz processor, 64 MB RAM, 480 MB hard disk space, 8X CD-Rom

According to the copyright screens, Geographical Information is supplied by Navigation Technologies (NavTech)

Legalese: This review was done on personal basis, I'm not in any way related any of the mentioned companies.