I do have a handheld garmin I use for kayaking/hiking/etc, and another unit for cycling. I think the dedicated units (garmin, tom tom, etc) are great for basic navigation, but Google maps with its live updating and Waze for real time traffic, police, etc are way more powerful. I often end up chasing by myself and I just need to be able to glance quickly at the screen and see what my road options are, etc. I also use Google maps (or Waze in cities) simultaneously on my phone and/or tablet when I'm trying to find a hotel or want an ETA or something, but it eats data and you have to keep it alive on the screen somehow and I have lost data many times at critical times.
My initial testing with Delorme and the Lightroom integration seems to work great, and with a Windows 8 touchscreen laptop it's pretty cool to just drag around the maps on the screen-I run a split screen between the map software and GRLevel when I'm in chase mode. It would break each GPS trail into hundreds of segments, come up in a distant time zone (UTC?), etc. I moved this time back to Delorme because the GPS tracking in Streets and Trips was causing me all kinds of problems when trying to tag my photos using the map features of Lightroom. I used Delorme Street Atlas back in the 90's and then a few years ago got into Streets and Trips, and now I just moved back to Delorme. It's biggest drawback is when you are in the rare situation when cell data is unavailable but that's why a dedicated GPS navigation device pays for itself. I'm not a fan of Google, but their Maps app is far superior to anything else out there and it's free. And it's also hard to beat for easily finding anything you could ever need to find in terms of businesses.
If you want a quick, broader view, paper maps never fail.īut honestly, if you're going to use a laptop (or better yet an apple Ipad) Google Maps app is hard to beat for accuracy and keeping up to date with new roads, without constant downloads, plus it has the added benefit of live traffic conditions across ALL well-traveled roads, it's fast and very efficient. Save the laptop for radar, location plotting, and weather web page access. They use the same map database (Navteq) that the others use, plus have logging features and a multitude of other navigation related features.
Plus, with "North Up" turned on it helps keep you better aware of your location orientation IMO. I have SA2010, and it definitely has the problems mentioned above, along with some pretty odd routing quirks.I could never figure out why a lot of guys want to use a laptop and mapping software when highly functional and relatively cheap GPS units are out there that will mount in the windshield in ready view and are easy to operate with the touch of a finger.
Street Atlas has more features than its main competitor (Streets & Trips), but SA also has many more flaws too, including (as others have commented) poor quality/out-of-date map data, and that's on top of the extremely non-standard, clunky interface, that is much harder to use than it should be, even after you get used to it. I also asked the Delorme rep if there had been any significant improvements to the interface in SA2013, and he told me it was basically just a data update, and that they "are pretty happy with the interface the way it is." So unless whoever is in charge of SA decides to completely revamp it for Windows 8, I guess we can conclude that Street Atlas is already being treated like an end-of-life product (same as they have for several years now, at least since 2010, or whatever point prior to that when they added the nav functions). The Delorme sales rep told me they were expecting it 10/22 but it hadn't shown up yet, and that he didn't have an updated ETA.
Street Atlas 2013 was originally supposed to be available 10/15, which subsequently was delayed to 10/22.Īfter 10/23 came and went last week, with their website still showing 'expected to ship ' I called to ask when Street Atlas 2013 was actually going to be available.