Whereas Earthcomber's maps are organized by county, Navigate's maps are done by region. You load entire sections at a time, such as Western Canada, Eastern US, Midwest, etc.

Of all the software applications covered in this article, at $150.00 Navigate 7 is the most expensive. And it's only software; it did not come with its own GPS receiver. In addition to being the most expensive, it was also the most worthless.

It flat-out did not work.

Navigate 7 is supposed to be installed on a memory card by placing the card in a card reader and running the installation utility. Which I did.

The card is then inserted in the device and the on-card installation utility is run. Except the main installer did not put the secondary installer on the card, so there was no way to install Navigate 7 on my device.

For the average consumer this very likely would have been the end of the road. The FAQ section on the Route 66 site did not address this issue and in truth was quite useless. There's always the option of contacting tech support directly, but no one should have to do that just to get the application installed.

Not one to give up all that easily, I manually copied the files I knew to be missing over to the card and continued. It did install and run this time, but some of the files must have either been missing or corrupted because the display was incomplete. Missing was all of the speed, time, and directional data shown in the blue area of Figure K, a screenshot provided for the media by Route 66.

FIGURE K


How Navigate 7 is supposed to look, but didn't. Roll over picture for a larger image.

By some miracle of fate though, Navigate actually detected and recognized my GPS unit.

Had Navigate worked properly, I think I still would have had complaints. With the exception of the main screen, it wasn't at all intuitive. In fact, I found it a bit confusing and quite frustrating.

I'm not one bit ashamed to say that Route 66's Navigate 7 PPC is the most worthless GPS-related expenditure of $150.00 I have ever seen. Even Earthcomber was better. I'm just thankful it was provided to me as a review sample. Had I actually purchased it for its full retail price I would have been quite angry; once software is opened it can't be returned.

Due to all of its faults, shortcomings, and errors I cannot recommend Navigate 7 for purchase. In fact, I will go so far as to advise readers to steer clear of it and rate it at 0 out of 5. I think this may be our very first Totally Unplugged rating ever in the magazine. Not something to be proud of. Fortunately, there are better solutions below.

OUR RATING: 0 of 5

The Street Atlas 2008 package actually contains software for multiple platforms. The core, of course, is the PC program shown in Figure L, which is also compatible with Intel-based Macs running Boot Camp or Parallels for Windows XP.