Archive for September, 2005

Dreamsoft’s World Atlas 2.0 is an application that, at first glance, promises a lot. World Atlas provides world maps on PocketPC devices, which is something that appeals not only to travellers. It is very disappointing when one discovers how limited the functionality of this application is. As a first criticism, the trial version provides a limited list of countries the user may choose from. The list of countries comprises the first few countries beginning with the letter A – not exactly useful to the large PocketPC community in Northern Europe. I doubt there are many PocketPC users in Algeria, for example! It is possible to manually pan and move around the map to find the required country, of course. A more relevant selection of countries would seem sensible to me. When selected, a graphical image of the country is displayed. Nothing fancy at all. In fact, any power user could easily download required maps in bitmap format from various sources without incurring any cost. There is no further functionality other than being able to pan and move around the image of the world map. There is no search function for capital cities, rivers or places of interest, to name only a few possible features the map could include. In my opinion, this application is far off the mark. For someone who is interested in having geographical information on a handheld device, I suggest the slightly more expensive, yet infinitely more powerful Pocket Earth by Blue Point Studios. World Atlas scores a low 3/10 in my book. It’s just not worth the 2MB download and certainly not worth USD 14 (about ZAR 90). Decide for yourself – download the trial version from Handango. You’ll need to have the latest version of the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework installed on your device.