If you’ve ever driven across North America, you’re probably familiar with the Rand McNally Road Atlas. This best selling travel guide has been available in print since 1924, and is without a doubt one of the most widely-used map books on this continent. The good news for Widows Mobile users is that Rand McNally and Handmark have joined forces to release the Rand McNally Road Atlas MMC, a “plug & play” storage card that slips into your Pocket PC’s SD card slot and contains the 2004 Rand McNally Road Atlas.
An interactive atlas and more!
Slip the card into the SD slot and watch as the Interactive Atlas launches automatically. The program has a simple and straightforward user interface (Figs. 1 and 2) that incorporates the important features found in the printed edition of the Road Atlas. One of the most impressive parts is the huge database of travel-related information, which gives you 64,000 miles of interstate and highway information, and the ability to search 10,000 interstate exits for gas stations, hotels, restaurants, places to shop, and ATMs. The Road Atlas database contains narrative descriptions of over 5,000 points of interest, which include major attractions, shopping areas, national parks, etc. All of this data can be accessed using the find function or by tapping on any one of the thousands of symbols that appear on the map screens (Fig. 3).
Figs. 1, 2, 3: The Rand McNally Road Atlas Opening interface (top). The City Index by State used to locate a specific city (middle). Tap symbols on the map screen (bottom) to get more information about a location.
The program displays driving directions and mileage calculations between more than 12,000 cities within the contiguous United States. Select the Get Directions option from the Route menu at the bottom of the opening screen and you are taken to the Plan Directions screen. From there, select a city of origin from a pull-down menu (e.g., Orlando, FL) and a destination city (e.g., Fairfield, IA). Then, tap on the Get Directions button to display turn-by-turn instructions with mileage between turns, as well as the total distance between the two cities and the approximate drive time for your trip. The drive time speeds are preset but you can adjust the speed for drive time calculations in the Preferences menu.
The program includes some basic mapping tools and viewing options. For example, you can zoom in and out on a map, set the map scale (3-285 miles), pan around the map, and filter out some of the map display objects in order to make the map more readable. You can also view a map legend, but most of the symbols are pretty easy to figure out. One of the more useful and perhaps underrated functions is the program’s ability to display a map page with an underlying coordinate grid. This lets you compare the map on the Pocket PC screen with the printed edition of the Road Atlas. This comes in very handy because the maps in the printed atlas are much more detailed than those in the software.
According to information provided on the Handmark Web site the Road Atlas can be used in conjunction with a GPS unit to track your current location on the map. I have not tested this function so I really can’t tell you how well it works.
Bonus software; suggestions
As an added bonus, the Road Atlas card includes the Rand McNally Mileage Calculator. In all honestly, you may or may not find this program particularly useful. For one thing, a mileage calculator is already incorporated into the Road Atlas program. In addition, the stand-alone version only includes about 800 major cities and rather limited information on about 200 attractions. On a more positive note, Mileage Calculator, unlike the Road Atlas, does include a number of major Canadian and Mexican cities in its database.
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