Worst Driver Ever? How NOT to Use Your GPS

While going through some reviews of Googles Droid GPS, I came across this gem.

Not only is he glued to his GPS while driving against oncoming traffic on a narrow curving road in the rain, but he’s also filming it, and reviewing it, and to top it off, his little daughter is in the back seat! You can hear her trying to get his attention, probably to tell him he’s being very dangerous and likely breaking several laws.

Judging from that annoying dinging sound, I’m pretty sure that either his seatbelt is off, or his daughter’s is.

Microsoft Streets and Trips 2010

If you’re thinking of buying Microsoft Street and Trips 2010, I want to share with you my personal experience. I began using Streets and Trips (S&T) for personal navigation back in 2006. It paid for itself within a month, without a doubt. Since I always had my laptop with me for work, it was no trouble to buckle it into the passenger seat and suction the USB GPS receiver on the windshield. That may seem like a hassle, but I only used it for my long trips into unknown territory.

Nevertheless, the average user would find significant problems with using your laptop for GPS navigation:

• You need your laptop
• If you have a passenger, there’s nowhere to put your laptop
• If you need to leave your car for a few minutes, you don’t want to leave your laptop sitting in the front seat. You’d have to pack it up, and then either bring it with you, or put it in the trunk before you park so that nobody knows you have a laptop in the trunk!
• In some states and countries, it may be illegal.

The advantages of laptop navigation are:

• You only need to buy the software (and USB receiver)
• The big laptop screen makes for easy navigation at a glance
• The keyboard makes it fast and easy to enter addresses and browse around the map
• While your laptop is open, why not play some tunes?

Recently I upgraded to Streets and Trips 2009, mostly to get newer map data and more points of interest. Aside from that the only notable improvements over Streets and Trips 2006 is an optimized layout (larger buttons and text), and automatic re-routing (a big plus for when you miss your turn, and a standard feature on most GPS units).

Microsoft Streets and Trips 2010 Improvements

Streets and Trips 2010 adds several incremental improvements over 2009, including:

• Ability to toggle the display of pushpin sets
• Importing and exporting GPX files (standard files for GPS data)
• Ability to export data to a mobile phone or other GPS device.
• Updated mapping data and POIs
• Construction avoidance (existing feature, but worth mentioning)
• Save your route data including waypoints, notes, pushpins, and your path (also an existing feature, but a great one)

Streets and Trips 2010 Features

Streets and Trips has several advanced features that make it, quite honestly, my favorite navigation tool if I have room for a laptop. Without the keyboard/mouse interface, these features would be too clumsy to be practical. But if you’re sitting in your parked car or planning from home, you’ll be glad to have them.

Route Planning: Once you’ve chosen where you’re going, you have several ways to chose a route. If you don’t like the automatically calculated route, simply drag the route path onto a road that you’d like to take, or off of a road you want to avoid. This is hugely useful, as you can change the route as many times as you want. Over 300 pushpin types means you can mark personal points of interests before you leave, or (more useful I’ve found) mark interesting things as you discover them on your journey. And of course you can add unlimited waypoints or stops along your path, and manage them in the Route Planner panel.

Route Options: You can ask it to avoid certain types of road (on a sliding scale of avoidance), and tell it the fuel efficiently of your vehicle (miles per gallon, or liters per 100 km). Several other options to fine-tune the auto-routing.

Trip Scheduling: Streets and Trips has a fantastic interface for planning your long trips. You can specify when to leave, how often you’ll stop, when you’ll stop for the night, and how fast you’ll drive. It will calculate your route itinerary and show you where you’ll need to take breaks or find a hotel, and tell you how much you’ll spend on gas.

Video Tutorial for Streets and Trips

If you’ve never used S&T before, this is a very helpful tutorial with overview of key features.

Overall Review of Streets and Trips

For the serious traveler, Streets and Trips offers a great depth and breadth of features. These advanced features are rarely seen on portable or self-contained GPS devices, and can save you both time and money. Now that it can export GPX data, the serious traveler or tourist will also appreciate they can export data from their trip to another device, or simply save it in the native S&T map format.