Delorme Street Atlas USA 2006 Handheld Description:

Delorme Street Atlas USA 2006 Handheld review:
4 stars (Not bad for the price) - Well, Delorme has improved a somewhat bad product into something useful. I remember back with Street Atlas for the Palm and I couldn't get it to stop crashing. Now, I've installed SA USA 2006 and notice a great speed improvement. If your files are on a storage card or on an external device, it takes a while for it to load it into main memory and will slow it down.



Put the map files you want to use into main memory and you'll see a great speed increase. The program is not without its bugs or bad features. Mapping is something that you might want to do on your PC instead of your PDA. Use the routing features for getting yourself on track or small distances instead.



Like someone else said, unlike Streets and Trips, you can create your own maps by selecting blocks on the main map. The maps are somewhat smaller than S&T. Plus, it doesn't limit the size of the map unlike S&T. Mapping and directions are very good on the PC. If it gives you a route with a street that you know is One Way or Do Not Enter on it, you can edit it and the PC will recalculate.



This program on the PC *actually* can send just a route to a PDA. Go to "Map Files" and hit Exchange. The program will copy the file to your ActiveSync directory.



You can set the Off Route distance to 500 ft or Infinite when tracking by Route. The GPS seems to be slightly off from the map at times, but not by much.



One thing that most people find annoying is that the system doesn't redraw the map until the cursor is at the edge of the screen. This can get annoying, but if you zoom out a bit and use the routing bar at the bottom to indicate when and how far the next turn is, you can get used to it.



Some map programs go for $90 that can do about what this program does, but for $35, it does what I expected from it. It's much better than Rand McNally's version (which I can't even get to calculate directions). Delorme has improved this product quite a bit (and it even mentions that it has VGA support for newer PocketPCs).



One note though. My GPS (a Deluo GPS) wouldn't work, would sometimes lock up the GPS, and the program wouldn't start. Just set the GPS option to Earthmate and it should work just fine.
1 stars (Poor performance...) - I have had this product for a few months and have used it on my Dell Axim x50v on trips to California and Massachusetts. Selecting maps to download to your Pocket PC on your home PC is tedious and has no provision for downloading only a route without a map. Downloaded is slow for any large metropolitan map area like Boston or San Francisco. Once a map in loaded one can route on the Pocket PC but I had the Axim never complete many times after waiting over 15 minutes. I had to do a hard reset to get out of it. Cancelling the routing did not work.



Also, when the routing did work I found that it often made poor route selections. For instance routing from Southborough, MA to a zoo in Southwick (only about 40 miles), it chose to use a state route parallel to I495 and jumped on and off the expressway rather than using I495 for the entire route.



Not worth your money in my opinion.
1 stars (Incompatible wit Windows Mobile 5.0) - Street Atlas 2006 Handheld will not connect to your bluetooth port if you are running Windows Mobile 5.0, so if you're using a bluetooth GPS you're SOL with this product.



Delorme is aware of this huge issue, but continues to sell the product. If you want to get a refund you have to call them long distance at your expense to get an RMA and then send it to them via a "trackable" (read UPS or FedX) method. Really shoddy practice. I would have expected much better from Delorme. Fortunately I bought the product from Amazon, so returning it to them was no problem.