For Autoroute, it's pretty much business as usual, as anyone who has used the program over the past couple of years will testify. Little has aesthetically changed with the 2006 edition, in fact at first glance it's tricky to spot anything that's changed. But there are some little evolutions to the last outing, albeit nothing drastic.

Given the upsurge in the usage of GPS systems, it's unsurprising to find Autoroute integrating more freely with this technology. The program comfortably syncs with a PDA or Smartphone, to which maps can be transferred, and there's the Driving Guidance segment of the program too. This will display textual directions in a large font, although it does assume you already have a GPS receiver for in-car use.

Likewise, if you want the program to read instructions out to you, you're going to need a text-to-speech engine already installed. Yet if you have all this in place, it's a suitably efficient GPS solution, right down to having a special "night time" road map style if light conditions are low.

For those who use Autoroute in the "old-fashioned" way, there's still not a program out there that marries up quite so much content to so slick an interface. There's plenty to like: the simple route planning, the excellent drivezone feature (which allows you to put in a base address, and then a time, with the program displaying how far you can get based on those parameters), the immense level of detail (right down to, er, cholesterol-inducing American fast-food restaurants) and the breadth of the coverage. The UK and Ireland is comprehensively detailed, as usual, but this time more of Europe is included too.

As usual, the directions have a habit of being a little optimistic in their time estimates, and there's the infamous red herring turn that crops up from time to time. But when we compared the directions Autoroute was generating to a selection of free-to-use online sites, it compared quite well. While, to be truthful, there wasn't much difference, Microsoft's program did provide the more reliable directions overall. That's accompanied, of course, by a caveat that no computer route-planning program is infallible, including this one.

So what do you actually get extra this time round? You've probably already twigged the answer to that. A handful of extra features and a data update is pretty much your lot. To be fair, that still leaves Autoroute as the finest application of its type on the market. But with serious competition coming from the likes of the GPS market and free online route-planners, you can't help but concede that it's little bit less essential than it once was. Still strong, but perhaps no longer a necessity.

Autoroute remains an excellent route planning application, and regular travellers are wise to invest in it. The casual user may as well save the money and use the admittedly slightly less reliable online equivalents.