Visual IT Tube 2 London Geo

Visual IT’s Tube 2 has long been the de facto tube/subway/metro map and planning application for a range of handhelds and smartphones. It may not be the most innovative application around, but you’ll struggle to find a better one – if for no other reason than no other digital map comes close to the level of clarity offered by Visual IT.

Its latest product is Live Info – a service that lets you see the latest public transport travel information on a handheld device that has internet access. It’s only available for London maps at the moment, though support for other cities and countries is planned (Visual IT offers underground rail and street-level maps for everywhere from Amsterdam to Washington).

We tested Live Info with Visual IT’s new London Geo map – a geographically accurate map of the London Underground that shows the position of tube stations and tube lines on a real world map, rather than the more popular (and famously abstract) diagrammatic Tube map.

The London Geo map is just as well rendered and legible as Visual IT’s other maps, even on the comparatively low 240 x 320 resolution screen of most Windows Mobile devices. Map design aside, the Geo map works in just the same way as the Tube map – it is just another map plug-in for the Tube 2 application, after all.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tube 2, it’s essentially a route planner for public transport. You can plot journeys either by selecting end points on a map itself or from drop-down lists of stations. Trips can be displayed either as a list of directions (complete with the number of stops and changes) or as an animated journey on the map itself, and you can even opt to avoid particular lines — handy if one is out of action, or you just dislike the smell of the Northern Line...

Since line problems are an everyday occurrence on then London Underground, Live Info’s ability to pull the latest travel information from the web will clearly appeal to commuters. It’s obviously only useful on a handheld with a wireless data connection and only works when there’s a signal (not in most Tube stations, in other words), but a quick peek on the way to the station is all it takes to avoid a disastrous journey.

Live Info appears as a menu option on the main map display and each update is only 3Kb or so. It really doesn’t offer anything that you can't find online for free, but the text is concisely formatted to fit a handheld’s screen and the whole experience is far smoother than viewing the appropriate Transport for London web page in a handheld browser (particularly if you’re using Palm OS...).

Live Info works well, but it’s a shame that its up-to-the-minute travel information isn’t furhter exploited by Tube 2. It’s left to you to manually rejig your journey if there’s trouble en-route, and this can be a chore if you’re unfamiliar with the London Underground's workings.

We’d be much more impressed if Tube 2 was able to automatically compensate for Live Info troublespots when planning a journey, although this would necessitate a download before each journey was planned. At only 3Kb a pop though (and few people will plan more than a couple of Underground trips a day), this would hardly break the bank.

Live Info is only available with the London or London Geo maps, and only for the Windows Mobile version of Tube 2. Existing users qualify for a 50% discount on the £12.99 price of a Live Info-enabled  map until the end of January, but it's a shame that exisiting users can't get the Live Info feature for a smaller fee for a map they already own. Prospective users can at least download a free demo of each map though, albeit without the Live Info feature.

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