Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007 w/ USB GPS Review

Initial criticisms aside, after a couple minutes spent stumbling around the interface I managed to get the hang of everything Streets and Trips had to offer. The main window is broken into four main sections: the toolbar, the side pane, the map pane, and the drawing toolbar. Skimming along the main toolbar you'll find icons for saving and opening trip files, printing, using the clipboard, controlling which side pane is currently active, and shortcuts for a few other functions including importing data and searching with Windows Live. Underneath are more map-specific controls for going back and forth between locations (similar to a web browser), homing in on a certain point, zoom controls, selection controls, and map type selection. There are four main side panes that are the focus of much of your time in Streets & Trips: the map's Legend and Overview, Route Planner, Find Nearby Places, the GPS Task Pane. The Map itself has four main modes - road, nighttime road, political, and terrain.

It's like back to the late 90s.

Route Planning
The legend is self explanatory for anyone that's ever used a map before, so let's move on to the Route Planner. Here you can quickly add addresses, businesses by city, and latitude/longitude coordinates into your route, as well as order and reverse the list of waypoints before your final destination. Stop times, arrival times, and departure times may also be defined here. Lost drivers looking for guidance will have to pay attention to street numbers, as street intersections can't be inputted.

Upon asking for directions, you'll notice that the top portion of the map pane has given way to a new directions pane, complete with directions for the day, estimated times of arrival, mile markers and distances until the next direction. It's possible to optimize these directions further by inputting a number of factors such as your average start and end times, how flexible you are (can you drive another 2 hours to arrive at your destination, or will it tack another day on?), if it should account for rest stops and how fast you drive on various roads compared to the average joe (or is it compared to the speed limit, I have yet to figure that one out). You can also somewhat control what route you'll be taking between waypoints, by choosing to go via the quickest or shortest path, as well as "preferred roads", where you can state how much you like surface streets versus interstates or other highways, and if you want to damn the toll roads.

Of course, no one would be buying Streets & Trips if it only had the ability to route between A and B, so you'll find yourself host to a number of other features, such as the ability to input your average city and freeway miles per gallon so it can estimate your gas costs, or to just calculate cost based on a fix dollar amount per mile if you have to figure maintenance expenses. It can also provide refuel warnings in your driving directions, but these warnings are largely useless as I'll explain later. Up-to-date highway construction details can also be included in your driving instructions, although throughout the course of my road trip I found that they were incomplete. Microsoft can't be faulted for this however, as they simply pull the data from NAVTEQ. More on this later as well.

The Bundled GPS Receiver
So users don't have to go sifting through reviews and sales talk to find a compatible GPS receiver for use with Streets & Trips, Microsoft included one in the box that's as simple to hook up as plugging a USB device can be. (Why else would I be reviewing this?) Because this is my first GPS review, I can't provide any charts or technical comparisons between other GPS receivers, but I have done my share of odd tests and can let you know right now that Microsoft's receiver does not disappoint.

The receiver is actually made up of three components - the 1.25 square inch receiver that you see in the stock photos, a 1-3/8" serial to USB converter, and a USB extension cord with a suction cup. No drivers are required to set up the receiver, and users won't have to mess with the device manager to configure COM ports either, although advanced users can do this at their own will. No, all that's required is to plug it in and in the GPS pane go to "Configure GPS", click Scan, select the unit and click OK. Painless, right? A soft blue light will shine from the receiver to indicate it has power.

At the heart of the receiver is the SiRFStar III chipset, praised for its low TTFF (time to first fix) and ability to maintain a signal even in dense cityscapes. The chipset really outshines older receivers that I've used in cars, able to lock onto my position in less than four seconds as soon as I enable GPS tracking. While a small suction cub has been affixed to the cable for optimal dashboard mounting, it's not entirely necessary, as the receiver works fine on my passenger seat or even on the floor of my car when the receiver unstuck itself from the windshield after a nasty pothole. It's here that I'd like to point out that for the first few days you're breaking in the suction cup, be sure to mount it on the passenger side so it doesn't strike you in the face like mine did.

One important tidbit for any Macbook users reading this, Microsoft's GPS receiver actually works in Parallels Desktop unlike many Magellan units (and the software runs w/o a hitch), so feel free to map your heart out without rebooting into Windows as I do. Yes, that means you can use Front Row for a more driver-friendly iTunes interface.

Where Am I?
Streets & Trips has two main ways of figuring out your position. The first and least-used way is to attain your general position by looking at the available hotspots within range. As you can imagine, this is hardly ideal for areas without municipal WiFi, due to the fact that Microsoft most likely isn't driving around residential areas plotting everyone's wireless router. It does work however in large travel stops, as it could actually tell where I was when I stopped for the night at the Super8 motel in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Still, I personally don't see why anyone would opt for this method over a standard GPS receiver, which brings us to the second and more obvious way Streets & Trips can find out where you are.

Streets & Trips 2007 was meant for GPS, and is almost pointless in my opinion without it. You can either use the receiver they included in marked boxes, or any other receiver that adheres to NEMA 0183 version 2.0 protocol. Once tracking is enabled in the task pane, the map will instantly fix on your position, and you may optionally arrange the map view to keep your position centered (manual, use + and - or the toolbar slider to zoom in and out) or use "Dynamic Turn View", which constantly scales the map to fit the current stretch of driving until your next instruction. Both of these modes have the option of rotating the map to match your current direction instead of keeping north upright. It's also possible to enable a GPS trail of where you've been, but I strongly suggest you disable this feature for long trips. I'll let you know why later in the review.

When the GPS is enabled, it's possible to enable driving guidance, which opens its own pane along the bottom of the map with your next driving direction. Here you can see and hear your next driving instruction, how many miles before you hit it, a progress bar to give you a visual idea of how close you are to completing this driving instruction, and your estimated driving time remaining for the entire trip. Should you stray off route, an audible notification will instantly be told, and you may either go back to your route or re-route from your current location. This does not occur automatically.

Another feature enabled by using a GPS receiver is the new Fullscreen mode introduced with Streets and Trips 2007, only accessible when driving guidance is enabled (so you need a GPS receiver). Here you see only the map and the driving guidance pane, along with four large buttons visible when moving the pointer to toggle voice instructions, repeat the last instruction, re-route from your current location, or switch between night and day maps. Each of these functions has their respective single-key shortcut as well, so you don't have to use the trackpad while driving.

What's Nearby?
A large database of points of interest is built into Streets & Trips, and you don't need an Internet connection to browse through it. Simply put in what you'd like to see (choosing from restaurants, airports, amusement parks, campgrounds, casinos, gas stations, hotels, rest stops, ski resorts, the list goes on), and where you'd like to see it, and a list of places will populate the map and the Places pane. You can search around your current GPS location, a specific point, a waypoint, a driving instruction, or the entire route, as well as specify the radius of the search such as all gas stations within 2 miles of where I'm currently parked.

By double clicking a point of interest, you may view its address and phone number. Right clicking the business will give you the option of adding it as a waypoint, useful for plotting the hotel for the night. If you're connected to the internet, you can view even more points of interest using the Windows Live database, but your GPS must be disabled.

The Road Trip
As a recent college graduate about to enter the Air Force, it only made since for me to pay my friends and family back in Ohio a visit (and take advantage of the free storage offered at my parent's house). I needed a break from Southern California's smog after all. Because I'd be on the road for three days, I figured this would be an opportunity to thoroughly test Microsoft's GPS solution well beyond what most reviewers would be able to accomplish in their busy lives.

It turned out I was right too, as I have a lot of criticisms and praise, mostly criticisms, that need to be handed out after such an extensive road trip, not to mention my testing as I re-learned the roads of Columbus once I arrived back home. After all, I drove just shy of 2500 miles with Streets & Trips 2007. As such, you'll find all of my important notes (the juicy bits) in the sections below.

Ready For Action
First, so you have an idea of how I conducted this review, it's important you know how I had Streets & Trips set up. Unlike my last cross country trip that involved a newbie driver, fender bender and a near run-in with a deer, I decided to do things differently this time 'round, the most obvious being my ditching AAA's paper TripTik for Streets & Trips 2007.

The other major change was a new set of wheels, since my old '92 Accord has been suffering from chronic visits to the mechanic. Considering the amount of junk I'd be lugging back and my frequent LAN trips, I figured an 07 Honda Element EX would do nicely. As soon as I found out I'd be reviewing Microsoft's GPS bundle, I fitted a laptop mount to the front passenger seat bolts to keep my laptop firmly secured in a eye glance's view out of safety concerns, and the fact that the passenger seat would be loaded with beef jerky.

I'd like to take this time to point out that anyone using a laptop-driven GPS unit should place serious thought into having a laptop mount installed in the vehicle if a passenger won't be relaying instructions. It's too dangerous to constantly turn your head towards the passenger seat at highway speeds, and your laptop most likely would end up flying if you had to hit the brakes hard.

Due to the fact that Apple has no idea how to implement speakers in a Macbook, I took a 3.5mm audio cable and plugged my laptop into the car stereo so I could hear the audible directions given from Streets & Trips. iTunes would be running with its own volume halved so I could still listen to music while driving. A cheap inverter would also be used to provide the laptop constant power throughout my journey. The end result winded up looking like this:

The Path Taken
My trip would take me from Rancho Santa Margarita, California (about 40 minutes south of Disneyland) to the northern suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. Seeing as how I didn't care for sightseeing but wanted to see my friends and eat real pizza again, this would be a speed run, so I plotted out the route in S&T to take the Quickest Route, which mostly consists of I-40 and I-44 through the middle of the US. Unfortunately, this path takes me through a toll road in Oklahoma, and I hate toll roads.

Changing to preferred roads mode, with Interstates and Other Highways set to most preferred, Arterial Roads set to neutral, and toll roads to least favorable, I found my path wildly changed to take me through the northern states going along I-70 as you can see below. Not only would this cause lots of delays, but it could potentially cause me to get stuck in a snow storm. So what did I do? I cheated.

My true route was decided after going to MapQuest, plotting my course and checking avoid toll roads. It placed me on my initial route of I-40 and I-44, with I-540 and US-71 to get me past that toll trap. Later on I discovered that US-71 is an older road that doubles as a surface street through some small towns, but that slowed me down so little I'm surprised Streets & Trips didn't opt for that route anyway. After all, don't both services pull their data from NAVTEQ?

Once I decided to take the MapQuest route, I went back to the Quickest Route option in Streets & Trips and then dragged a section of the outlined path towards I-540, just on intuition. Cheers to Microsoft because this actually worked, and the next thing I knew I had a waypoint that read "near Armada", and my route was perfect.

With the route decided on, it was time to head out. Microsoft estimated 2352 miles, with 36 hours of driving. With my optional data plugged in, it was translated to 2 days, 8 hours, and a cost of $266 in gas.

Might as well be Muted
The first and most annoying problem I discovered with Streets & Trips 2007 was its voice directions. They're completely useless, other than to serve as a reminder that you should be doing something. What that something is is anyone's guess. Instructions are given at the beginning of an instruction, and 0.5 miles or less (sometimes 0.3 miles) until the next instruction. Driving on a large crowded freeway at 70 miles an hour, I can tell you right now that half a mile is nowhere near enough time to get over four lanes.

The instructions themselves offer little advice, omitting street names and highway names, merely stating "In xxx miles, turn left". Great, how's about telling me what to turn left on to? If I'm in a city, these streets can be closely packed together and I may not be able to tell the difference between 0.2 and 0.3 miles that easily. I don't care that the text to speech engine would slaughter some street names were it to even bother trying, a slaughtered name is better than no name when there's densely packed streets or off ramps. Also, it's in the documentation that double tapping the space bar in fullscreen mode tells you your next instruction, but considering this next spoken instruction would also omit names, it too is rendered useless.

This leads me to my number one concern with the GPS receiver. You have to look at the screen constantly to know what you're going to do next. Microsoft says it best every time you enable driving guidance:

I'd have to agree, except for the sole responsibility part. My good judgment would be to stop using Streets & Trips since even with the laptop professionally mounted I hardly felt safe when eyeing for directions, especially when going through several freeway intersections during rush hour in St. Louis. Luckily for you the reader, I'm a stubborn risk taker and decided to keep the review going.

Mostly Accurate
I will say that the directions for Streets and Trips have been more or less dead on. After all, I made it back to Ohio in one piece without ever looking at a real map once I hit the road. While directions aren't perfect such as the lack of compass directions for interstates (turning onto I-5 Northbound instead of simply I-5 would be nice), there were only two notable occurrences of misdirections being given.

The first was partially my fault. I turned off of the one ramp too soon after seeing a gas station sign, and ended up on the 165 turnpike in Oklahoma. After seeing no off ramps after a mile of driving, I decided to re-route, and to my dismay the directions told me to turn left where there wasn't a turn and pull a U-turn. I'm assuming it meant to turn into the crossovers that were lining the middle of the road, but when I was told to turn left there wasn't even a crossover there. Even then, aren't crossovers meant for official use only in most states? After 2 more miles I gave up and took one, getting back on route.

The only other misdirection I encountered surprised me considering it's a well traveled route to get to the Ohio State University campus. While the path itself was technically correct by glancing at the map, a useless direction was inserted that would have lead me astray if I didn't have any common sense or my friend co-navigating. Taking OH-315 Southbound, at the Lane Ave. exit I was directed to keep straight onto "Local road(s)" for a whopping 10 yards before turning left onto Lane. Why not just tell me turn left? Had I followed directions (turning left was skipped), I would have found myself back on the freeway.

In any case such minor errors are to be expected with any mapping software, as I remember MapQuest routing me the wrong way on some one way roads before. Even then I believe either TeleAtlas or NAVTEQ is responsible for the routing in this product, so I can't fault Microsoft. What matters is that there was no road I traveled in my near month of use that was left uncharted, nor were there any subtle directions that led me completely astray.

Mixed Map Quality
The maps provided by Streets & Trips 2007 weren't bad, but they weren't great either. Both Dynamic Turn View and Centered View hold their own, although at times it was easier to get an idea of what's ahead with Centered View zoomed partway out. Daytime maps were full of contrasting colors and never had a label that was obstructed the roads. Nighttime maps however could have used some additional coloring besides green, and could have used darker colors as well because even with my laptop's screen brightness turned to minimum the screen was still overly bright at night time.

Working with the maps was a mixed bag as well. Moving and zooming across is more complicated than it should be (it's hard to manually center on a point compared to Google Earth) and selecting certain objects sometimes becomes difficult if there's a route or other label next to the point. On the other hand, it was easy to click and drag existing routes to take new roads, and it's also easy to measure the distance between multiple points, although the final line doesn't show up in night mode like it does in daytime mode.

The drawing toolbar seen in Office products like Word makes an appearance in Streets & Trips, complete with pushpins for marking locations, a highlighter, and various other marking tools including lines, arrows, radiuses and text boxes. This was all very straightforward.

Places - A Good Idea that Needs Work
The Find Nearby Places has its ups and downs. On the plus side, its database is incredibly comprehensive, and it doesn't require the Internet. Many gas stations, banks and what not are listed, searchable within ranges, and include phone numbers. It's how I decided on my hotel for my 2nd day once I realized I wanted to stay at a Super 8 since I knew they had WiFi.

However, that's about all you can do with the service on the road. What I'd like to see is an "xxx miles until next gas station" feature, or perhaps even preferred travel stops (stops, not stations) where you could know you're getting a safe and inexpensive fuel-up. Rest areas would also be a nice addition for those hitting the roads with pets or children. If there won't be any stops for a while, say if you're about to pass through mountains, a "last gas for xxx miles" would be nice too.

Hopes for future features aside, the current implementation in Streets & Trips 2007 is broken, and that's ignoring the fact that a handful of gas stations including a TA Travel Stop that looked about 5 years old or so judging by the parking lot were excluded from the database (although most were listed). Simply put, I found it easier to instinctively plan my gas stops based on the interstate signs for the next major town. What's more, when zoomed out far enough for interstate travel, all icons are missing. When zoomed in for city driving, the icons are too small and anything other than a gas station has a simple colored dot with a color coding system that somehow classifies banks, schools, rental car agencies and police stations under the same color purple. Only when zoomed into what I consider suburb level do the icons diversify themselves. To make matters worse, graveyard drivers using the green on black night map don't see any icons whatsoever regardless of zoom.

Timing and Delays
The ability to adjust your driving speed and figure in rest and gas stops to accurately estimate your ETAs is a tricky business. Figuring in a 15 minute stop every 4 hours seems like a good idea, but that wouldn't line up with actual turnoffs, would it? Nor would it account for the built-in rest stops when gassing up. As such, I found the best bet is to disable the automatic rest stops and simply drive for 8 hours, find a marker (there's plenty of "At exit xxx, keep straight" instructions to keep you in check) and play around with the average driving speed sliders in the route planner until the markers line up to your actual progress within 10 minutes or so.

What I found funny about this is just how ludicrously fast the sliders are at their default position. The average speed limit was 65-70 miles per hour on my trip. I tended to speed over this by a large margin when the roads were empty, which they were for most of the way in between towns. Justice be known, I received a written warning from the friendly officers outside of Amarillo Texas, thanks for not ticketing me. Factoring in the need for rest stops, eating in the car (it is a speed run after all) and Murphy's Law, you would think my averaged out speed over time, around 63 MPH would be in the center of the slider, since it is about speed limit after all. Nope, during my long distance trip the sliders were about midway between "Slower" (the bottom) and "Average" (the center). I have no idea how these sliders do their math since there's no numbering to be found, but does this mean Streets & Trips programmers condone the fact that most American drivers break the speed limit?

As for avoiding construction delays, I found that many of the construction traps I hit were not listed in the up-to-date database I downloaded right before I left. While I know the database isn't maintained by Microsoft, it is a selling point for Streets & Trips 2007, so as far as I'm concerned it's fair game for my criticism. I hit unlisted construction near Albuquerque and Santa Rosa, New Mexico, Gruhkley and Amarillo, Texas, Havenhurst, Arkansas, and finally in the cities of Springfield, Rolla and Gray Summit, Missouri. Granted, these construction quirks were relatively minor setbacks compared to driving along I-5 at rush hour on any given night, but these were all significant construction sites with some dating back a few months according to the posted signs.

That isn't to say that all construction wasn't listed. What I encountered at Adrian, Texas and Dayton, Ohio were both listed. I should have paid attention to Dayton especially since that construction was a nightmare, which leads me to my next point. If possible, I'd like to get a severity rating with my construction warnings so I know if the posted construction is significant enough to try and find alternate routes for.

You Have to be Kidding Me
Throughout the course of my journey I was plagued with one annoying glitch. At first I thought it was just a bug with Parallels virtualization running Windows Server 2003 under OS X, but after installing Streets & Trips on my native Windows XP partition for the third day of my journey, I was convinced there's a fatal bug in Streets & Trips 2007.

When traveling long distances with all the GPS bells and whistles enabled, I would find that whenever I zoomed in to the second to highest level or beyond, either manually with Centered View or automatically when Dynamic Turn View comes close to the next major instruction, the program would lock. 100% CPU, near-zero responsiveness, and unlabeled streets fueled my rage as I would find the program locked every time I stopped at a gas station or rest stop that was a hearty distance from the last stop, about every 3.5-4 hours. Audio instructions were skipped during these fits as well. With patience rivaling that of a Saint's, I found that unchecking the GPS and re-enabling it would solve the problem if you didn't want to wait for the next instruction to come and clear the problem, although both were unbearably slow, averaging 3 minutes to fix.

No Patch In Sight
After talking to one of Microsoft's engineers about the problem, I discovered that this is a known bug that is not presently solved, and it's caused by a leak in the GPS trail feature that marks down where you've been just like the good old days of highlighting where you've been on a road map. This would explain why I haven't encountered the bug during various errands within Columbus, and why other reviewers haven't taken notice of this problem. It's only applicable during long trips. How long? I'm not quite sure, and I don't have the gas money to find out.

Now ordinarily I wouldn't put much of the review's final lean into a bug. After all, they get patched, right? Not so for Microsoft's Streets & Trips 2007. There is no way to patch the program. No automatic updates, no downloadable patches, nothing. What's scary is that every time I talked to a Microsoft rep about this problem, they'd toss off the question assuming I wanted updates to the street data, which I know is infeasible due to the fact that Microsoft has to pay NAVTEQ for the road updates and can't just hand that out for free. But this is a program error, not a mapping error, and it's only natural to believe they'd want to correct their own mistakes.

Unfortunately this just isn't the case. Not only will owners of the current Streets & Trips 2007 have to wait until next year to get the latest release that hopefully has the issue under control, but they'll have to pay for the upgrade. From a consumer's standpoint, I find it unacceptable to have to wait for a year to get a fix to a known problem, knowing that I'll be paying for someone else's mistake. To make matters worse, I was told that my request for a patching system would only be considered, and it's unlikely we'll see it implemented in the 2008 version. So what if the next release has even more devastating bugs? Just buy the 2009 version? I think not.

Recap
It's not often that I write such a lengthy or negative review, but the amount of pain I endured throughout my 2500 miles of testing made it necessary. True, I survived the cross-country road trip, the directions were mostly accurate and the maps are well laid out, but there are a number of show stoppers that I feel are significant enough to give Streets & Trips a condemning Do Not Buy rating.

The microscopic and outdated 1997 interface without any tutorial, incomplete and uninformative construction warnings, and a Places system that could use some work are enough to give anyone headaches. Toss in laughably useless spoken directions along with the worst mapping bug to never receive a patch, and Streets & Trips 2007 just crossed the line from annoying into hazardous - no one should ever attempt driving alone with this at the wheel under any circumstances.