Microsoft Streets & Trips

Microsoft Streets & Trips is one of those programs that leaves you wondering: How could such a mature product from such a huge company still have so many holes in it? Most of the right pieces are here, but its implementation falls short.

The most puzzling omission is a voice command function, especially since Microsoft is one of the leading text-to-speech technology companies in the world, and even offers a free text-to-speech engine download for Windows. Without voice control, a driver has to look at the screen to use it, not at the road. We might forgive this oversight if Microsoft had included a driver-friendly view in which text was oversized or upcoming turns flashed red, but it doesn't. This is clearly a desktop mapping product with a GPS receiver slapped on.

There are other signs of poor implementation, too. Streets & Trips offers a drawing toolbar with shapes, lines, fill colors, and such. That's good. But you can't change the color of the highlighter to reflect different travel tasks or priorities, and the highlighting is solid, not translucent, so it blots out the map features or text you want to highlight. There's also a distance-measuring tool, but the distance lines that get drawn stay on the map. We figured out how to delete segments to reduce the clutter, but not how to batch-delete multiple segments or entire trip loops without closing the map and opening a fresh one.

To test the product, we set out on a 300-mile road trip from Portland, Oregon, to a small college town called Ashland, which attracts tourists to its Shakespearean theater productions. Microsoft's directions proved excellent. The only anomaly we noted with Microsoft's very accurate GPS reporting was a 300-foot change in elevation while we were stopped at a red light. (There have been reports of metal car frames interfering with the Microsoft/Pharos GPS receiver.)

When we got to Ashland, Streets & Trips did a respectable job of pinpointing restaurants and hotels of every type, although we had to dig into the points-of-interest options to make them visible. Clicking a point-of-interest (POI) name generates a flag on the map showing the point's exact location, along with an address and phone number. There are no ratings or reviews for POI items.

Despite its failings, there is a great deal to like about Streets & Trips. The ability to export any displayed map to a Pocket PC or Microsoft-based Smartphone is very handy, unless you're a Palm or Symbian user. The GPS task pane offers the options to keep your position centered on the map, rotate the map around you as you turn (this is useful, but fairly disconcerting to watch), and to create a map trail showing where you've been.

We found that Streets & Trips tends to prefer the shortest rather than quickest route, when there's a difference. This resulted in situations where we intentionally abandoned the program's recommendations, but it consistently was able to adapt and recalculate a new set of instructions based on our current position. However, the program issued no alert when we left the prescribed course. Also, you must manually tell it to recalculate from the current position, and we kept wishing it could compute this automatically so we could keep our hands on the wheel.

In a nutshell, Streets & Trips 2005 excels at helping you plan how to get from here to there. The GPS implementation is only half-baked, though, and we don't recommend it for actual road use at all. Better to spend $30, after rebate, for the non-GPS version of Streets & Trips 2005 instead.