Customer Reviews

Delorme Street Atlas USA 2008 Plus [Old Version]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Upon installation I view the map for my own city, Bend, Oregon. The major highway, completed 7 years ago, is not shown! Numerous other missing and mislabeled roads make the map so unreliable as to be almost useless. Other paper and electronic maps, even those 5 years old, have the major roads shown correctly.

I've been a long time user of Delorme's printed map products and love them, so Street Atlas USA 2008 was a big disappointment. I was previously using Garmin's Que software on my PDA, and it was time to upgrade so I thought I'd try Delorme's product. In a nutshell, it's terrible. It's extremely awkward to download maps to the PDA and the PDA software doesn't have a fraction of the functionality that the Garmin software has. If you are intending to use this software on your PDA, I would strongly discourage you from purchasing this product.

I don't know why I keep buying DeLorme products. They are always disappointing. Sometimes, as with Topo 6.0, they are the best of a poor lot. With Street Atlas, however, there are many better choices available.

The first problem I have with this version of Street Atlas is the Graphical User Interface (GUI). I just don't understand why DeLorme doesn't change it. The GUI is non-intuitive, difficult and cumbersome to use. It feels years out of date.

The map graphics have always been awful and really need modernizing.

Points Of Interest (POIs) are a disaster, as always. Stores that closed years ago are still shown, in some cases with their replacements! In looking over the POIs near my home, I see a FedExKinkos a couple of miles away, but not the one just down the block from me which has been in that location for years. A restaurant north of my location on the other side of the street is shown in the wrong place. Type in "parks" and all you seem to get are fitness centers of one kind or another, not the open spaces with greenery and playgrounds like the three within a half mile of my home. Putting it bluntly, the POIs are by and large unreliable - and very weird. Among the results for my search of "parks" is an ice cream shop and the office of a community orchestra.

One of the strangest things I found in my testing of the POIs was that it correctly identified two restaurants associated with a hotel . . . but not the hotel itself, though hotels on either side of the one with the restaurants were correctly identified.

Street Atlas 2008 is simply too unreliable to be used for locating points of interest.

Routing has improved. I entered a route which I know earlier versions would really foul up, suggesting that you go many miles out of your way. This time Street Atlas almost came up with the most efficient route. I was surprised.

The telephone listings are, as usual, a mixed bag. I found listings that I knew were years old and wrong along with listings only a few months old.

Street Atlas does have some unique features, such as listings of AM and FM radio stations for an area.

I really doubt that I'll even try Street Atlas with a GPS. Earlier versions didn't work all that well.

On the whole, however, Street Atlas remains at best a mediocre product. There are several other products of this kind available, all of which are superior to Street Atlas. And, of course, most of the new self-contained GPS units, such as the Mios C520 (Mio C520 Portable Car Navigation Systemare much more convenient as well as more usable.

Jerry

Works very well on my Palm T5 with maps off SD card with zooming being very responsive. Works very well on my P3 laptop. Works well with my bluetooth Holux GPSlim 236 GPS and my Holux M-1000 GPS. Activating the GPS on my Palm was very easy. I like the interface to create/print maps (yes I like it better than some of its competition, but I admit there is a slight learning curve for the "I use Windows only Point-and-Click" crowd). Map accuracy seems better than previous versions. Map updatedness seems acceptable. The extra phone data helpful. Ability to use satellite maps interesting, they allow a free limited download for some. Customer support is responsive and knowledgeable. Community message forum support is likewise helpful. Product is priced competitively and offers great value. NO PRODUCT ACTIVATION required.

I have seldom been as disappointed in a product as I was with Street Atlas 2008. I have used a number of other mapping products over the years including previous versions of Street Atlas. This one is a definate step backward. The interface is cumbersome and the mapping is terrible. Took a look at my home town (Parker, CO). It found the town and identified several of its restaurants. Unfortunately it drew them all South of town rather than North. It shows driving from my home location down main street to the main intersection, but then shows a left rather than a right turn. Tried to download the free aerial data set. Clicking on any item under "Netlink" resulted in a "error has occured, line one, character one". I thought this might be a function of the computer, so loaded it on my laptop. Same error messages. Also found mention of these errors on their forum, without resolutions. Spoke with their tech support and their response was that it must be an Internet Explorer problem. Asked if they could explain why it occured on two separate computers, one runing v. 6 and on running v. 7. Their response was "well then, it must be something in between your location and our server". No help whatever. Buying this was a grievous mistake and one that I will not make again with a Delorme product.
John Waterman

I used Delorme's AAA Map-N-Go product for years, updating as new releases became available. When it was no longer available I called Delorme to find out when the next version would be out. I was informed that the company was going in a different direction and focusing on the GPS in car market and were no longer going to produce a pc based program.

I purchased Streets and Trips 2006 when the old Map-N-Go data became too dated. Streets and Trips doesn't have the depth of Points Of Interest (POI) but the interface is simple and easy to use.

I've continued to receive offers from Delorme. When Street Atlas 08 became available I bought it. I was looking forward to the simple interface with in depth POI information I had enjoyed with their earlier products. What a disappointment.

Inputting addresses and stops is cumbersome. The POI information is limited and difficult to access. Routing is not intuitive. Multiple way points are required to achieve the simplest route. However the Maps are nice and the other programs that they'll sell you will make it even prettier.

I feel better about throwing this thing in the trash now that I've shared my frustration.

I had only used this software on very short trips. We then went on vacation to San Diego. When you really need this software, it really fails. It tries to route on roads that don't exist or are not really useable (the road exists but does not go through due to rail road tracks etc). It also routes in very strange and almost incomprehensable ways. For example. We were heading south to San Diego. I turned on to I215 being quite shure it went to san diego. It said off route and recalculating. It routed me off of I215 all over san bernadino just to put me back on I215. It should have left me on I215. After that I no longer trusted the software. It has become an on screen map on the computer. Never trust how it routes, always review what is decides. This thing would send you to the moon and back just to cross the road.

I have a GPS in my car, and Microsoft Streets and Trips 2005. I saw this product today at Office Depot, and it looked like it might be easier to use to import data points, so I thought that I'd give it a try. It was the newest version in the store. It was more than twice as expensive as the new version of Microsoft Streets and Trips.

I was searching for about 20 points this evening for a business presentation. Almost none of them were found by this software. The maps are very outdated. In fact, Microsoft S&T 2005 was much more up to date. The DeLorme product had missing addresses for major buildings that had been in place since 2002. Fully one half of one city (Frisco, Texas) was missing (including it's professional soccer team and stadium) that has a population today of 100,000.

Buy an outdated used copy of Microsoft Streets and Trips. Better functionality, newer maps, and probably almost free these days.

This is the best mapping program for the price (or any other price). Delorme is the premiere mapping company in the USA. Buy this to run on your laptop or desktop and you will never be lost again. Much better than Microsoft Streets and Trips I use GPS equipment and software on a daily basis at work and this program is as good as it gets.

I bought SA2008 for use on my Palm Treo 650 with a Holux M1000 GPS. First of all, I should say that if one were using it on a laptop, it wouldn't be too bad, since you can have the entire nation at your disposal, and, if you install the 150 million phone listings, you actually have an incredible resource, even if they are not all perfectly up to date. Furthermore, although we didn't try to use the GPS with the laptop version, it appears to have most of the necessary functionality for navigation, etc.

However, using this combination on a Treo 650 was NOT a pretty picture. First of all, as one of the other reviewers mentioned, you have to download map segments that you are interested in. And, you apparently can't download very large areas without incurring some sort of performance issue (though it was not described specifically.) One of the issues is certainly not having enough memory on your Treo to happily run SA2008 and also maintain a bluetooth connection to the GPS. I tried repeatedly for a week and never managed to maintain a connection for more than about 30 minutes. Essentially, the bluetooth would lock up. The vendor from whom I purchased this combo actually eventually said that they don't recommend SA2008 for the Treo... (thanks...after the fact). And, while it was clear that part of the problem was the blue tooth connection, it was also partly the SA2008 since when I started clearing apps out of RAM and onto an expansion card, the performance did get better, but I eventually has about 9MB free (out of 24 or so) and the system would still not stay connected. The Delorme tech support people did discuss this problem but had no ideas about any adjustments to make.

Of course, even if there had not been this problem, the truth is that the handheld version of SA2008 is unexpectedly poor. Some examples: a) it is not possible to ask it to take you from where you are now to a destination--the nearest restaurant for example. Instead, you have to disconnect from the GPS, build a route from where you are now to where you want to go, reconnect the GPS, and then follow the route by "tracking". There ARE limited voice directions, but they are not nearly sufficient to follow without looking at the map or with the aid of a helper. b) It doesn't know enough to stay on roads. Example--things like access roads are not in the system, so if you start from a parking lot, it's anybody's guess as to how it will decide to get you onto the route--usually it involves some sort of driving through a building or two... c) It will tell you that you are off the route, but, it doesn't recalculate. This is probably the biggest shortcoming. There are times that you can't avoid going off route (construction, missed turn, etc.) so you REALLY need to have it automatically recalculate. d) There were a couple of times that the route that it calculated actually retraced itself, wanting me to get off of a freeway and then get right back on... NOT.

Bottom line is that for the price, I would say that using SA2008 on a laptop might be a decent solution (I DID connect to the GPS with a Bluetooth adapter, and it seemed to hold that connection fine, even though we didn't do any navigation.) However, if you want to even THINK about navigating with your PDA, I would definitely go elsewhere.