Windows Phone Thoughts: DeLorme Bluetooth Wireless Earthmate GPS PowerPack Reviewed: GPS, your way

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Wednesday, January 26, 2005

DeLorme Bluetooth Wireless Earthmate GPS PowerPack Reviewed: GPS, your way

Posted by Kevin Remhof in "HARDWARE" @ 10:05 AM


Desktop software
The desktop software, Street Atlas 2004 Handheld allows you to create maps and routes to transfer to your Pocket PC. Unfortunately, that is harder than it sounds. Normally, when I need to figure out how to go somewhere, I bring up a browser and go to MapQuest, MSN Maps, or Yahoo! Maps. These sites are great but are not very full featured. That's why I had such hopes for Street Atlas 2004 Handheld.


Figure 5: The main screen of Street Atlas 2004 Handheld. Click for a larger version (207 KB).

The maps are definitely the best feature of the desktop software. They are very detailed right down to the street level. Zooming in all the way will show you restaurants, gas stations, hotels, and other businesses. Zoom all the way out and you'll see all of North America on your screen. The version I reviewed includes only major Canadian highways.

The first thing to do in Street Atlas is to create a route for your trip. Just type in your start and end locations and click "Calculate", right? Sort of... this works great if you use the correct format for your addresses. If you don't, Street Atlas rejects your input and clears the Start and Finish points. The correct formats are "street address, city, state" or "street address, zip code". These formats aren't unusual, just a bit confusing. I would much rather see a form with clearly marked street, city, state, and zip fields for you to fill out. That would eliminate the guesswork. You can also click on the map to set a starting or ending point but that can be imprecise.

After you have created a route, it's time to transfer the map to your Pocket PC. You can choose from two different Data Export Levels: 10-0 and 12-0. 10-0 gives you street details but is not routable. In other words, you won't be able to create routes on your Pocket PC. 12-0 is more detailed and is routable. To transfer a map, you must first create a map. Pick your Data Export Level and start selecting areas of the map to include. I created a route between Chicago and Washington, D.C. At export level 10-0, I had to choose approximately 60 different rectangles from the map to get the entire route. At 12-0, it took 300 rectangles. There is no way to automate this (that I could find). You need to zoom the map to a point where you see a grid on the screen. Then, click away. Sixty clicks seemed excessive. Three hundred was ridiculous.


Figure 6: Building a map, one square at a time.

After selecting your map areas, it's finally time to transfer the map, right? Wrong. After selecting, you have to save the map. You do get a progress bar so it's easy to see the status. But this process is painfully slow. Be sure to grab a cup of coffee while Street Atlas creates your map. Finally, you can transfer that map to your Pocket PC. The app has a built-in feature which does this for you. It's a bit confusing but it works fine. The files created when you build a map can be quite large. Make sure you have plenty of room in main memory or you won't be able to transfer. My export level 10-0 map was 6.7 MB. The 12-0 map was 16.5 MB. Big but not too bad as long as you have a storage card..

To save some time, I found that it was much easier to just save the maps and ignore the Exchange functionality in Street Atlas. All maps and routes are saved in a common directory on your PC. If you just save instead of Exchange, you can copy the files to your Pocket PC by hand. I used a USB card reader to transfer files directly to a SD card. This was much faster. The transfer speed really has nothing to do with Street Atlas though. It's dependent on the transfer speed between your PC and Pocket PC.

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