Street Atlas USA Reviewer's Comments
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Reach your travel destinations fast and safe with Street Atlas USA by DeLorme. Our street travel “TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award” winner can give you reliable driving directions and works with all types of portables from laptops to iPods to Palms.
Street Atlas is up-to-date and includes over four million points of interest, including driving maps for Mexico and Canada. It is also perfect for truckers since it not only includes driving routes but also truck stop and service information.
The map software offers excellent search tools, can accept and give voice commands and supports the addition of local and private roads. Maps can be printed, shared, synced and downloaded.
This is a great travel mapping product, is easy to use and extremely portable, so now you can hit the road with confidence and never drive around in circles again.
Street Atlas USA Screenshots. Click to Enlarge
Ease of Use:
Thanks to pop-up tutorials and a well–conceived structure, Street Atlas USA takes little time to master. This tutorial includes animated visuals alongside text, which makes learning about Street Atlas's features quick and easy.
The only setback is that with so many features available, you may get anxious to hit the road to try them all right away.
Feature Set:
Right from the start, DeLorme scores high with a brief, interactive tutorial that teaches you how to use the basic navigation tools.
The program is not GPS compatible but with a serial port connection to your laptop, you can get real–time tracking. Real-time tracking will display on your laptop screen your current location on the map as you travel. Therefore, with your laptop and a GPS unit you can have real-time tracking, detailed maps of the entire United States, driving instructions, and contact information for local attractions for less than fifty dollars. Though Delorme does offer GPS bundles that include both street and topo type maps. If you want addresses and phone numbers included with your mapping program Delorme provides this information in Street Atlas Plus.
One feature that sets this new version of DeLorme Street Atlas apart from the rest is the large font display. DeLorme recognizes the safety advantage of having fonts that are easy to read while on the road, and the large fonts and screen are not cluttered. Another key feature we enjoyed was voice navigation. The program gives and responds to between 30 and 40 voice prompts, allowing you to keep eyes on the road, not on the laptop.
Points of Interest:
DeLorme went out of their way to put together a massive database of POI that totals over four million locations. We don't doubt the authenticity of this claim, but were disappointed that several gas stations in our travel area didn't appear on the map. And no matter which method we tried, we never found a grocery store. (To DeLorme's credit, none of the other programs reviewed showed these ordinary but vital locations either.)
Other than this, we found the POI information to be accurate and abundant. And one of the best parts of Street Atlas USA is the ability to customize POI. You can narrow or expand your search area with keywords, and you can choose which types of POI you want on the map, while leaving others off.
Map Customization:
Multiple waypoint tracking allows for you to insert as many stops as you want or simply plot a point on the map that you just want to drive through on the way. Using Street Atlas USA, you can customize your map with personalized notes, map notes, freehand drawings, symbols, and you have the option to add local roads to the map. You can print your customized maps or bring your laptop with you to make changes as you travel. We only wish this program offered the ability to plot multiple routes simultaneously.
Safety Features:
Street Atlas USA offers a comprehensive list of telephone numbers to access local road construction updates, weather updates and hotel information. Street Atlas goes above and beyond to make sure you don't get lost. The compass, voice prompts, alerts and automatic back–on–track settings make DeLorme Street Atlas USA deliver security and peace of mind that you can't travel without.
Ease of Setup:
We didn't encounter any problems.
Help / Support:
Street Atlas USA sports an in–depth, easy–to–locate help section. No matter where you are in the program, a help box is always located in the upper–right–hand corner. Click this when you have a question or want to access the safety features. The FAQ section can also be found there; we used this and found useful answers with little effort.
DeLorme also offers online forums, phone support and email support; the manufacturer responded promptly to our emails. The user manual, a PDF file in the help section, requires an Acrobat Reader download (a free download).
Summary:
Street Atlas USA by DeLorme not only beats out the competition, this mapping software dominates the field. Because this program offers so many useful options and features, DeLorme Street Atlas USA is the most sophisticated mapping software available.
©2008 TopTenREVIEWS, Inc.
