M&T Top Cities Europe

A useful idea with some valuable content.

If you're taking a PDA on holiday, why not load your guidebook onto it and ditch the paper volume? It's a good idea, but poorly executed - at least in the case of Map and Travel Top Cities. For a start, you must install each of its 16 cities individually, which is tedious if you're on a European tour. Once inside the package, the planning tools are also decidedly shaky.

Mapping a simple route from PCW's offices in London's Soho to Liverpool Street station took us almost as far south as the Thames, before curving around and heading north-east to our destination. The station is directly east, and there are far more direct routes for both driving and walking that go more or less as the crow flies. In Florence, meanwhile, even picking start and finish points on the same road threw up an error. 'There is no routing information about startpoint,' it said. Our only option was to click OK.

However, the vector-based maps are pin-sharp and the local information, from the excellent Lonely Planet guides, is comprehensive and enough to see you through a weekend away. We'd have liked the camera icons to be linked to pictures rather than just pointing out good photo stops, but that would have gobbled up our PDA's memory.

In all, it's a great idea, but we'll be sticking with the paper alternatives for the time being. Perhaps version two will give us reason to reconsider, but until the whole of a Lonely Planet guide can be crammed into a PDA, this product will always fail to rival its less technical inspiration.

Contact: Mediagold 020 7221 4600
www.mapandguide.com/topcities

System Requirements:

• Pocket PC using ARM, MIPS or SH3 processor
• 32MB Ram plus 2MB-8MB for each map installed
• Pocket PC 2002, Windows CE 3.0 or above