FIGURE L


Delorme Street Atlas 2008 for the PC. Roll over picture for a larger image.

In addition to the main application, Delorme has also included the Palm OS and Windows Mobile versions of the program. Figure M below shows the Windows Mobile version.

FIGURE M


Delorme Street Atlas 2008 for Windows Mobile. Roll over picture for a larger image.

With Street Atlas, you can plan routes and trips, including any stops, waypoints, or POIs you desire. You can route from address-to-address, or point-to-point. Search parameters can be by place name, address, street or intersection, and businesses can be located by name or category. Maps, routes, and POI info can be captured and exported to your Palm OS or Windows Mobile device, even exported for media players like the iPod and Zune.

Honestly, I could go on and on about all of Street Atlas' features, but there's really no reason to. So many of them either didn't work, or didn't work properly that there's no way I could recommend it for purchase.

The first thing that struck me about Street Atlas was how complicated, and quite frankly intimidating, the interface seemed. After stumbling around a bit, I finally got the GPS device recognized and synched up. Once it located my position and loaded the POIs, I discovered they weren't accurate.

Not every single POI was wrong, but a sufficient number were so as to make them unreliable. It's not so much that the POIs it displayed were nonexistent, it just showed them in the wrong location. And when I brought it to Delorme's attention and inquired as to why they were incorrect, I never received a response back.

Initially I was just going to call it a day at this point. I had immediately found a problem and got no reply from the company; and customer support is very important to me. But in the interest of the consumer I delved further.

I next tried the routing feature; and again it failed miserably. Street Atlas was unable to locate any of the addresses I put in. I thought perhaps the street address itself was giving it trouble, so I tried just the street names; again, it could not locate them despite the fact that they were clearly displayed on the map.

Ever the dogged pit bull, I chomped down even harder and went in for more. I attempted to select a region for export to my handheld, but I guess I chose too large of an area because Street Atlas crashed while exporting.

I chose a smaller area next, just a single state. But again, it crashed during export. In the end I selected just my metropolitan area, which finally exported properly; even at that, it was a 2MB file for an area of only about 400 square miles.

Street Atlas is supposed to send these exports to a location from which they can be transferred to your handheld the next time you synchronize; except it didn't. It wouldn't recognize my device, nor did it put the files in a location from which they could be synchronized.

I dug around in some file directories and found the map file, then loaded it onto the handheld myself. But even then it was a substandard experience. Routing could only be done by selecting points on the map, not by name and address. But since the core application couldn't find any addresses anyway, I guess it's a moot point.