Route 66 Maxi

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/handhelds/0,39030065,49294905,00.htm

Reviewed 4 January 2008

Reviewed by Brett James

The new Route 66 Maxi gives you all the basic components you need to navigate straight out of the box and then offers you a series of flexible upgrade options to expand your device to suit your budget.

You can now buy the regional version of the Route 66 Maxi for a starting price of £140 or £200 for the European version.

Strengths
The Route 66 Maxi looks stunning with its brush steel metal finish encased in a slim-line body. The 109mm (4.3-inch) widescreen display, along with the hi-res maps, literally magnetises your eyeballs to the screen.

The Maxi's interface also looks fantastic with large icons and animated scrolling menus. Additional touches to the interface and maps come from the transparency effects, which in the case of the maps will allow you to view optional directional aides on-screen whilst the map is still viewable underneath.

For navigating to destinations you have the superb Fuzzy search engine with attached Qwerty keyboard option. The search engine will allow you type in parts of an address, so instead of typing 'Boldmere Road' you could type 'Bold Ro' and the system will display the closest matches.

The 'Extras' menu, accessed via the device or PC software, will allow you to access the Route 66 online store to add additional content to your device such as safety camera updates, TMC subscriptions, Lonely Planet travel guides or to adjust your interface and map colours. Certain options are free, others will vary in price.

While driving, the Route 66 Maxi could pick up our location quickly and its general route performance was good. Its initial route calculation could have been quicker, but after performing a system update via the Extras menu this seemed to improve matters.

Maps were visually impressive and routes were enhanced by a colour-coded system that shows your optimum route in a different colour.

The Maxi comes without an MP3/video player, but you do get a picture viewer and a screen shot function for taking images of your maps.

Weaknesses
The Maxi does not come with a Bluetooth option as standard, so you are going to have to shell out an additional £75 for the FM/Bluetooth cradle. The TMC subscription service found under the Extras menu requires a TMC/Bluetooth cradle (due out soon) so coupled with the other Extras options the amount of choices for upgrading may be enough to put some people off.

A contact manager is also included with the Maxi which allows you to navigate to contacts at a touch of a button, but it did not seem to allow Outlook contacts to be imported. There is also a SMS-style mail symbol, which we assume will allow you to send destination info via SMS text. However, this option was constantly greyed out.

We could not find a dedicated route simulation option as standard, so you will need to make use of the itinerary lists for additional planning.

Voice directions were clearly spoken and accurate but you won't find a text-to-speech option for pronouncing road names. You need to rely more on the maps to navigate.

Conclusion
Route 66 have done a good job on the Maxi. Its style is certainly a vast improvement on the previous Chicago series. The Maxi also provides users a low-priced stepping stone into the world of widescreen navigation, with the added bonus of multiple upgrade paths, though some may prefer everything to be included from the off.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday