Fresh from the mail box:
Originally Posted by tomas
Canada is available now.
Regards
Tomas
Not sure about the U.S., though.
Coverage in and around Regina is decent. Outside the city the coverage is somewhere between a basemap and a modest roadmap. It has all major highways, most secondary highways and a few rural roads, or at least parts of them.
The street grid for Regina is pretty good. It lands somewhere between Metroguide Canada v5 (out of date even before it was released) and City Navigator North America 2011.20 (pretty decent). That is, it has some newer subdivisions that Metroguide Canada does not have but not everything City Navigator has.
The address search really isn't. It prompts you for the city and the street name and, optionally, a cross street. So it's really a street or, optionally, an intersection search.
I'm not sure if this applies to all maps or just Canada. E.g. maybe it's just because Canada does not have civic addresses in it (house numbers) and maybe other parts of the world do?
Searching for POIs works nicely and I was pleasantly surprised at the number of local POIs the free map contains.
The only way to zoom in and out is to click on the + and - buttons on the screen. This has problems because it seems like it jumps multiple zoom steps on a single click. This is most annoying because you can see it jump right past the zoom level you really want when zooming in both directions but you are powerless to make it stop at the zoom level you want.
I think this may be a side effect of the way the zoom buttons work. You can click and hold on them to zoom multiple steps without having to click multiple times. That's a nice feature but I think they've set it to be way too sensitive. If my guess is correct, there needs to be a longer "repeat" delay in it so you can easily single-step one zoom level at a time when that's what you want to do.
EDIT (25 Oct 2010): Apologies to MapFactor. I retested after a couple of others pointed out that they had no problems. Both functions work. It is not a well-behaved Windows application. Some really basic operations are not honoured. So far, without doing any serious testing, I've stumbled across two.
1. Alt-tab does not work so you can't switch away from it once it's running full screen. This presents a problem because I haven't figured out how to make it run in a window instead of running full screen. So once I'm in it I can't switch to anything else without shutting it down. I've only messed with it for a short time so I have not explored all possible settings.
2. Alt-F4 does not work to close the application. This is annoying because there is no exit button/icon on the main application screen and it takes clicking through a couple of menus to exit using the menus.
The upside to the way it runs fullscreen is that if you run it on a small screen like a netbook or a tablet or UMPC, there are none of the usual Windows controls hogging screen space so the map display gets it all.
As I mentioned, I have not spent a lot of time with it but generally I like it. Even this free version would get the job done nicely, at least in Canada, as long as you don't need to search for addresses or find your way around on rural roads. Pretty good for free.
...ken...