Customer Reviews

Delorme Street Atlas USA 2007

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

 

 

Over the years I purchased SA 2004, 2006 and now 2007. I should have stayed with SA 2004 as the same mapping information is apparently used in all of these versions. No new roads or updated mapping information for areas of NC (Charlotte) and coastal SC (Myrtle Beach and Charleston) for roads which have existed for many years (since 2002). If you have any previous releases do not bother with SA2007. Otherwise you may be very disappointed as I was.

I bought this primarily for the included Pocket PC version to use with a Bluetooth GPS with my Cingular 8125 phone. Man, what a disappointment.

As others have mentioned, the interface on the PC version is completely unintuitive. Making a mistake is easy, and fixing it is difficult.

The handheld version included in the package is almost useless. It is slow, cumbersome, inaccurate, and inefficient.

If you're looking for software to make your PocketPC device act like a dedicated GPS device, I suggest looking at the TomTom software or iNav's iGuidance (which also includes versions for PC and UMPC).

If you're looking for software on the PC, at a comparable price, I've found Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007 to be far superior than Delorme's product. The interface is much more intuitive, less cluttered, and more informative than Delorme's.

You'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration by avoiding this piece of software.

The Street Atlas USA 2007 (SA2007) user interface is proprietary to DeLorme and not intuitive to Windows users. I also have Street Atlas 7 (SA7) and, even though it is also proprietary, I find it easier to use.
The streets in SA2007 are from the same old database used in Garmin's 1999 Road & Rec MapSource CD. In some areas, including Lake Tahoe, streets are significantly inaccurate. This was discovered by uploading GPS tracks to a PC and observing how well they matched roads on various maps. On newer maps excluding SA2007 the match was near perfect. On SA2007 and Garmin Roads & Rec the error was up to 350 ft.
I have several DeLorme products and must say I am disappointed with SA2007. I have uninstalled it from my PC and gone back to SA7.

The streets in many areas I have reviewed have not been updated in many years(5 in my hometown), so the 2007 version is no more helpful than my older versions. Save your money if you expected the latest in data!!!

Five attempts at install on an XP Home box have ended in failure: various snags have occurred during failure, from the infamous error 1720, to issues with my palm integration. Each error occurs only AFTER a long load of the three install discs, and an entire rollback is performed involuntarily. I've attempted to correct the 1720 error based on Delorme's recommendations, but that hasn't worked either.

Absolutely pathetic: why do we continue to encounter issues like this on home computers?

When it works, it works OK. The voice directions are often unintelligible, but that's more Microsoft's voice synthesizer's fault. Often it will call out a direction and cut its self off, saying something like, "Turn right at ock...", and forcing me to take my eyes off the road and stare down at the computer to see what it was trying to say. I could live with that.

What I would consider to be the first major problem is, it occasionally tends to take me off of freeways or boulevards and zig-zag every block through neighborhood streets and busy downtown sections. I usually don't even realize I've been screwed until the second turn when I look down and see a dozen zig-zags on the route that was a little 'curve' on the overall route I was taking, and by then there's usually no place to pull over and try to work out a more direct route, and I can't tinker with the thing while I'm trying not to crush pedestrians and crash into other cars. It doesn't 'penalize' turns when making routes, which add up to a minute each extra full-stop and turn.

The biggest problem comes in when you set up a longer trip in the wide open spaces between cities. The maps appear to have used satellite photography, which is very bad. They can't always tell whether it's a dusty road or a wagon trail, because the directions often want to send me on impassible dirt trails over mountain tops. The latest fiasco sent me PAST 95 (which definitely would have taken me to 62) from I10 to a typical retarded zig-zag through Blythe, CA and finally to a 'Midland Road', where the highway simply dead-ended at an old mine of some sort after taking me 20 miles out in the middle of nowhere. I was trying to go from 10 to 62 for a scenic route, and it decided that some dirt trail over a mountain top was a 'road' that would get me there. Something like this happens virtually every time I use the software in the countryside. Apparently they were ambitious enough to search for every possible road, but far too lazy to determine whether the lines on the satellite pictures really were roads, and not some rutted dirt bike trail (like maybe by picking up a PAPER map and cross-checking their assumptions). If I have to use a paper map to tell whether a route is valid every time, I'll just put the damned computer away, thank you. Usually it sends me a mile or two down some fire access road or private driveway, but this time I got to see an abandoned mine at the end of a road to nowhere.

I have been using 2003 street atlas and this is an excellent upgrade that corrected several problems. Currently though one problem that exists in this version is that it shuts down automatically when you least expect it to. It can be minimized to the task bar and automatically close.

The program has lots of points of interest (thought not a lot of campgrounds) and works very well to develop a route for a 3 month trip.

Product does not feature route recalculation. Lets say you are driving and there is an accident in the road ahead you are forced off route, the product does NOT recalculate a new route it just alerts you "OFF ROUTE" and will not stop saying "Off Route" until you stumble your way back on the trail!

Also the map pack is extremely hard to pick out your maps, you MUST select stuff on a county by county basis, rather than a state wide map or a region wide map.

It was off by a lot when I used it, mind you I only used it once to drive to work. I wasn't impressed at all though. I did use the software a lot to navigate for my wife while she was driving, so the software is great, the GPS locator that comes with it isn't worth the extra money. IMO just buy a GPS unit.

This product works quite well on a laptop. The user interface, like that of any of the other mapping/GPS program uses a markedly different paradigm than that implemented in a standard office PC product - probably since you are faced with true 2-dimensional data while normally the data set is 1-dimesional that mimicing 2d. Where the product falls down is in transferring that data to a Palm. Yes it's possible and even easy, but if you want to move a large data set, say a corrider from Washington DC to Philadelphia with both end-point vicinities, the program will chock during the conversion of the resultant 50+ MB. I had no problem with Wahington or Philadelphia alone, but the two, oh wow. I also had vainly hoped for turn-by-turn direction to be transferred to my Palm - not this version. The documentation, either inherent in the program, or by link to the vendor's website could also be more complete on how to use and/or tweak the program.