Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

This is necessarily a brief review. For a more in-depth look at this product, see Steve Clack's review in issue 20 of Palmtop magazine.

This is one seriously useful piece of software from the code wizards at Palmtop BV. For GB residents especially (most of Great Britain is covered, with 1500 town 'map squares' included, each of about 300km²), Street Planner '99 is the most impressive piece of software yet released for the Series 5 and is quite staggering in its scope. Loading up your home town area from the CD (each one typically taking up between 100k and 200k) and zooming in reveals that every road spur, every alley and every twist and turn of your neighbourhood is covered. Very impressive.

Although you can't route-plan between towns (unless they're close enough to be on the same 'map'), planning between locations in a town is near-perfect. One way streets are taken care of and personal 'avoid' roads and areas can be set up. As usual with Palmtop BV's programs, there are screens full of preferences, allowing the program to cope with both the XR2-owning boy racer and the pensioner out for a Sunday stroll.

As with Route Planner, the national-level sister product, the interface is comprehensive, even if the toolbar sliders are a little fiddly - it's well worth learning the keyboard short cuts. The overlay features have been significantly beefed up (complete with integral icon designer) and work very intuitively, even if the vast majority of towns don't have any overlays actually supplied. At least the facility is there to make your own.

The GB version takes up a whopping 410 Mb on the CD, which explains why the Europe version is squeezed out onto a separate CD, though there will doubtless be those who complain that both CDs should have been in the same box.

There'll be no complaints from me, though. Street Planner '99 is possibly the single most genuinely useful piece of Psion software I've ever seen and a massive endorsement of Psion's Series 5 and concept.

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