Customer Reviews

Delorme Street Atlas USA 2008 [Old Version]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I moved near the Hilton Head Island Sun City and ordered Street Atlas 2008 to update my five year old 2003 edition. Sun City and the surrounding town have doubled in size in the last five years, but Street Atlas has not added a single new street to the area in that time. Also, mislabeled roads have not been corrected.
I returned it to Delorme.

I have had this program in the past as well as Microsoft Streets and Trips, and i have always used the Streets and Trips more, it is easier to Maneuver around and find things. Yesterday I was using this program trying to find hotels in Las Vegas, and it would not list them without doing a bunch of hunting and searching to get them to appear. With Streets and Trips you go to Las Vegas and look up and down the stip and all the hotels are there and easy to find. i only bought this Delorme this year because they said that they had updated it and it was all better, well it is not. I will not purchase Delorme Street Atlas again, I will just continue to purchase the Microsoft Streets and Trips which will be out in August. thanks

Delorme Street Atlas USA 2008 comes on a DVD and installs without any problems. Its interface, however, is cluttered and not particulary user friendly. Various buttons and dials take up just as much screen space as the map window, which makes navigation frustrating. You cannot close and re-open navigation window panes to allow more room for the map -- you can only adjust their size by dragging window panes. This helps a little, but not much. I would have much preferred to have drop down menus than these giant unwieldy screen buttons.
The maps themselves are constipated with dubious points of interest at the expense of what really matters: placing addresses at their correct locations. Our neighborhood has been around for 20 years, and yet Delorme manages to "move" my house to the other end of the street. Visitors are going to have a lot of fun trying to locate my residence if they rely on Delorme, especially when it is after dark and one cannot very well read numbers on mailboxes. The little street next to my house is not even listed. This is odd, because all the major free internet-based mapping services (Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, MapQuest) have my neigborhood laid out correctly. Perhaps Delorme cartographers should borrow their maps from one of these services. And I thought that a mapping software that you pay money for would deliver a higher level of accuracy than free mapping softwares available on the Web. Silly me. Also, the main county roads (4-lane highways) running through our suburb actually have names, in case the folks at Delorme care to know it. It does not inspire confidence in Delorme's database to see these roads just labeled CR-118 or CR-112, instead of Fieldstown Road or Mount Olive Road.

Another problem that I have encountered is that if you want your trip routed correctly, you really have to micromanage this software and tell it which roads to avoid, and which locations to travel through. Otherwise it will by default direct your travel through tortuous and slow country roads (even when your preference is set to the "fastest", rather than the "shortest", route). The end result can be a trip that is 10 miles shorter but half an hour longer.

One of the reasons I bought this software was because of its capability to transfer maps to Palm PDA. Once again, from the programming perspective Delorme performs flawlessly. Syncing maps to PDA is very easy and painless. A single map will take anywhere between 2 and 10 Mb of space, so an expansion card is a must for your Palm device. Once in the PDA memory, however, the maps are of limited utility, as there is not much you can do with them. In a pinch, you can zoom in and find a street of interest. You can even plan a route (it will take a long time on PDA processor), although the direction can be only marginally trusted.

Overall, I wish I had spent my 40 bucks elsewhere.

I am an 'over-the-road' long haul truck driver. As such, mapping and routing is crucial to doing my job well. I actually use 4 different mapping programs (3 of them run on one gps receiver, the other is a stand-alone). It is totally possible to enter the same data into each program and come up with 4 different routes. But that usually doesnt happen. I do get minor discrepancies between them at times. Of the laptop/desktop programs, the Delorme Street Atlas (SA) is by far the best. Having said that, I will admit that it is NOT intuitive to use at first. MS-Streets and Trips (SNT) is easier to use out of the box and for simple short trips. However, after taking the time to beat the learning curve on SA, it is a far superior product than SNT. The third program that I have is a terribly expensive product designed to be used by truckers. It is useless for the most part. I only consult it if I have concerns about truck restricted roads or bridge clearances. They all have mapping errors in them. They cannot possibly keep up with all the road building that goes on, and must rely on input from users. I dont believe that many people take the time to report errors or changes. There is also a considerable lag time from when the map data is created and the software vendor issues the product. So yes, when you buy the latest version, it is already months out of date.

I am not sure where they get the data for commercial points of interests. In my opinion, I think many places have to pay for the 'advertising', thus if they choose not to, they wont appear. It was frustrating when I was attempting to find a local post office and the data was for a mailbox location. Again, the management and collection of this type of data is an impossible task,they must rely upon the veracity of the data that is supplied to them. Think of what it would cost to send someone to each and every POI to verify the information, and as well collect new data on new resturants, etc. We wouldnt be able to afford such a conveniece.

My advice to you is this, If you are a casual user in familiar areas, consider the dedicated units such as tom-tom or garvin or delphi. I dont believe that you get much by paying a higher price. I wouldnt spend more than a couple of hundred dollars. I would also look for refurbished units. They will give you the best price. Often, they are units returned to stores because the user changed his/her mind. Neither the store nor manufacturer can resell the item as new. There is nothing wrong with it and it will have the same warranty as a brand new one. They are all about the same, though I did like my Delphi unit better than the device I use now that runs Tom Tom. I would stick with the major brands, I just dont trust the no-names. A larger screen is about the only good reason to spend more money.

If you are a heavy user, one who is likely to have a laptop in your vehicle with gps, get both SA and SNT. Get the GPS receiver from Delorme. Then go to their website and download a free small program (called a serial port emulator)that will allow SNT and other programs to use the same receiver. For quick and easy routes use SNT. Use SA for your GPS monitoring. Compare the routes between the two products. If they are not the same, make a decision according to your preferences. You will find it much easier to manipulate your route in SA than in SNT.

And finally, my best advice to you, is to secure the device that you are using. The most popular item to steal from a car today is a GPS device. Remove it from you windshield, including the bracket. It is also a good idea to clean the windshield so that the ring mark left by the suction cup on the bracket doesnt advertise that you have and use a GPS device. A bother you say! Yep, it is! But not as much bother as having to deal with the result of your car having been broken into and stuff stolen from you! And please -- when passing me on the road wave with more than one finger (I go slow because I have to and it saves on fuel)and give plenty of room before you move back into the lane. At highway speeds it takes me 3 football fields to bring my truck to a panic stop. I dont want to have to live with the fact that I killed someone because the driver of the other vehicle was ignorant or in just too big a hurry.

I have 2 desktops and 1 laptop that have been using SA 2003 and 2005 Street Atlas and this upgrade is far superior to both of them. I use it primarily for route planning as I have two cars and one motorcycle with their own GPS's. I like the new Map Share feature where I can email my routes to others to view and print. The additional maps of Canada and Mexico are outstanding. The Via button is my friend as I use it constantly to plan my routes along scenic roads, and many are rural through state and national parks. I do have to tweak my route preferences often and recalculate to get it right. Navtech is the map data base and there are errors. I have the same data base in my Lexus and BMW and errors occur frequently. My Garmin on the motorcycle has errors from Navtech also. You can't blame DeLorme. Try Calling Navtech and alerting them to the errors if you want frustration. 2008 is much better than earlier editions, but it also is 2gb of data so have the memory and a fast chip. Go for it!

None of the changes made in my county the last three or four years are shown in the maps including the extension of a four lane highway.

Its OK if you live in old stable areas and you don't mind the map being so out of date.

We use DeLorme's Street Atlas as our primary GPS software for storm chasing. It has the best road detail of all the software we've tested, and we test primarily in rural areas, so if it's good there, then it should perform even better in urban areas. Two downsides are that it sometimes shows a city on the map but does not name it. Also, sometimes it shows a road unpaved when it is paved, as shown in the Delorme paper atlas versions. The paper atlases are actually more accurate. That's why our team of veteran storm chasers carries both.

Martin Lisius
Tempest Tours Storm Chasing Expeditions

My first trip planning software was MS Streets & Trips 2002, which I found very useful. Year end 2005 I replaced it with MS S & T 2006. The later issue had changes that diminished its function. The worst being selecting routes that were obviously not optimized; in many cases adding hundreds of miles and changing from a selected driving speed to `faster or slower' .

As I've become unhappy with Microsoft's policies; like activation and snooping into my computer for validation that my copies are not pirated, I now as often as possible choose their competitors products.

I chose DeLorme Street Atlas USA 2008 because of the glowing reviews posted on Amazon.

After receiving it, I began installation only to have the installation application be unable to find my broadband connection, then start trying to dial up a connection with a computer that has no modem and finally start configuring another broadband connection. Although I finally got it stopped and convinced it there was already a broadband connection, my computer now requires me to log on (I am the only user) where before it just went directly to the main XP screen.

A couple of days later my computer insisted that I run "chkdsk /f". Since it wouldn't continue, I selected 'run', typed "chkdsk /f", then restarted it to have chkdsk run for about a half hour and find a lot of file scraps.

Once Street Atlas was up and running, I found its interface to be absolutely non-intuitive. When I started planning a cross county trip, I found the mapping and POI (points of interest) information to be more out of date than S & T 2006. That was my main reason to purchase an updated version. Can you believe the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas isn't in the POI?

On the positive side, once you figure out how to negotiate its interface, the routing is spot on and it calculates the route very fast.

Knowing what I know today, I would not purchase this software.

I have used Street Atlas for GPS on my laptop for about 12 years now.

I am writing this review to warn other customers: WHEN YOU REGISTER YOUR COPY OF YOUR PROGRAM, DO NOT GIVE THIS COMPANY YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS. I have asked them over and over again to take me off of their mailing list, but I'm always getting spam trying to sell me the newest version of their program, or other versions.

The main reason I bought the Street Atlas in addition the Topo product was for trip planning and I the feature falls short. My main gripe is with the planning end of day stops.

Street Atlas allows you to estimate your end of day point by hours or miles. But once you decide where to stop for the day, Street Atlas does not adjust the remainder of the trip, it stays with the original end of day points. Even for a trip of only a few days, the end of day points chosen by Street Atlas quickly become useless.

Update 2/24/2008

I'm taking away one point. I'm planning a trip down to the Florida Keys. I camp a lot and while the their topo software shows the campgrounds down there, this one doesn't. How bad can a trip planning product be when the non-trip planning product beats it in trip planning.

I will not be buying anymore Delorme products.