When even the average computer user has had a good tinker with Google Earth for free, you'd better have something impressive up your sleeve if you're trying to sell a product called 3D Globe Deluxe. Especially if you want even a tenner for it. Focus Multimedia makes a healthy fist of things, though.

Initially you're offered the option of a smaller installation that requires the disc to remain in the drive when running the application; otherwise you can surrender around 3.5GB of your hard drive for a full installation (the product itself is supplied on a single DVD). If you have the space, it's worth doing the latter to keep the speed of the program up.

Because once up and running, it opens up at a view of the Earth that you're free to twizzle and zoom in and out of at will. You can zoom so you get an overhead view from approximately 90 miles up (it's in map form, rather than photographic), or you can pull back to nearly 12,000 miles away. Somewhere like the UK will fill in all sorts of town and city names, while less built-up areas of the world fare less well, with the occasional place name in the midst of the rivers and mountains.

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While zooming around the planet, which is achieved through a simple mouse-driven control mechanic, you can leave labels behind for future reference or, if you get tired of exploring, you can dig through a modest list of places to find that the program provides by default.

Also hidden away is a wealth of statistics, which dig down into details such as who is the biggest oil producer, where the birth rate is higher and who receives the most international aid. It would have been interesting to see this overlaid on the map somehow, given that 3D Globe Deluxe is essentially a visual application, but instead it's in the form of straight text lists. It's interesting information, certainly, but its static nature also leads you to suspect that it's not as recent as it could be.

You do have a handful of other options. We liked the feature whereby you could measure the distance between differing places, for instance. And also you can view the world via a satellite map, physical map, political map, bio-climate map or general view. Not all of these offer the same level of zoom-in potential, though.

There's an undoubted educational slant to 3D Globe Deluxe, which does set it apart slightly from Google Earth. Yet it's the latter that's advancing at speed and proving itself to be the evolving, no-cost alternative. 3D Globe Deluxe is fine as a static resource, and not without educational merit. But it should, at best, be considered a starting point.

A solid way to explore the globe, and one that's easy to get to grips with. A few more multimedia elements wouldn't hurt, though, and you can't help thinking that Google Earth will ultimately make it redundant.