Route planners are part of the staple diet of software your average PC might expect to encounter. They can work out some pretty fancy stuff these days; not just telling you how to get from A to B, but also the best place to stop for a quality cuppa along the way (with information pulled straight from the AA Guide to Britain's Best Tea Rooms and Sticky Bun Purveyors, possibly).

Route Planner 2003 is no exception and it introduces some novel and useful advanced planning features, which we'll come onto in a moment. First, the basics. The software covers the whole of Europe as well as the UK, with (cue pre-statistical divulgement drum-roll) detailed maps of 3,000 British cities, 1.6 million miles of road, spread over 50 countries, with 370,000 places of interest noted.

Basic operation of the program is pretty simple. Along with the central route planning aspect, there's an address database (to store commonly used addresses such as your home) and a decent search facility (for locating anything from towns to nightclubs). Route planning is merely a matter of typing in your starting location and destination, using the postcode or town name, followed by the actual address (if you have it).

Route Planner 2003 actually pin-points the address down to the house number and this extremely detailed coverage is unparalleled. We tested it out by typing in a range of exact addresses and it successfully located all but one, which is pretty impressive. The maps are very thorough, with up to 10 levels of road detail available, the top one displaying every proverbial nook and cranny.

You can specify stops along your route, highlight places of interest, work out the fuel cost of the journey and choose between taking the shortest or fastest route (not always the same thing!). Route Planner 2003 also lets you pull the latest traffic information off the Internet, courtesy of TIS Holdings traffic data, so not only do you have a very detailed map, but also up-to-the-minute details of traffic jams, road-works and accident hot-spots.

The details of your route are displayed in both map and written format, side-by-side, although there are weaknesses here. The map is quite clunky and on slower PCs takes some time to load when you scroll it. Plus you can only scroll the map in fairly big steps, which is rather awkward.

Some of the written route itinerary also seemed a little inaccurate. When plotting routes on roads that we knew well, it appeared to be misleading on several occasions. We did come across the odd straightforward bug too, like parts of menus mysteriously appearing in German rather than English.

More positively, Route Planner 2003 supports the exporting of route maps and itineraries to Palm Pilot PDAs (you need Palm OS 3.0 or newer) as an alternative to printing them out. It also supports GPS, providing your laptop has an NMEA-compatible GPS receiver.

Route Planner 2003 boasts some very detailed maps, down to individual house numbers, and impressive coverage of points of interest and so forth. The route planning process gives the user plenty of options and scope, while the live Internet travel data is a superb feature. The program does have its flaws though, most notably that the interface is somewhat awkward in places and the written directions seem to go slightly astray at times.