NaviGadget

Review of Microsoft Streets and Trips on Fujitsu P7010

Jun 26, 2006 gps navigation, reviews, software

Here is a nice and lengthy pictorial reivew of the Microsoft Streets and Trips with GPS locator installed on a Fujitsu P7010 laptop:

After a random trip to the local Fry’s Electronics I ended up buying the Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 software bundled with a USB GPS Locator. It was on sale and I felt like making an impulse purchase.

more pictures after the jump…


As you can see on the bottom right corner it sells for $120. I picked it up for $80 (well plus tax of course). After I came home I searched online; Amazon sells it for $100 and Newegg for $112. So it was a good bargain indeed.

Fancy box with a flap…

What’s in the box?
Well not too much.

• two installation CDs
• a little manual that I don’t plan on reading
• GPS receiver
• USB cable to hook up to your laptop
• suction cup attached to the cable

Here is a close-up of the GPS receiver:

I don’t know how I feel about the huge MS logo here. Anyhow and here is the back:
The GPS receiver is made by Pharos; and the model name is GPS-360. It uses the SiRF Star II chipset. You can find the specs here.

I decided to install it on my Fujitsu P7010D laptop which has a nice 10.6” screen.

The installation went pretty smoothly. I popped in the CD, it started automatically. After hitting ‘Next’ a few times I was done.

One important point during installation is to decide if you want a ‘full installation’ or a ‘minimum installation’. Full installation requires 1.1 GB and the minimum requires 550 MB.
If you go with minimum you’ll have to carry the ‘run’ CD with you, plus spinning the CD will waste your precious battery on that long road trip. So I went with the full installation.

And that’s it.

The installer created a shortcut in the start menu titled “Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006″.

I started the program and plugged in the USB cable attached to the GPS receiver. In less than a minute the software correctly pin pointed my location even though I was indoors, so I can’t complain about the reception quality. But unfortunately there was a problem:

The blue LED on the receiver! It comes on when you plug in the receiver and there’s no way to turn it off. I’ll have to live with it. Here is how it looks in the dark:

Moving on; time to test drive! Let’s play with the software.

I wanted get directions from LAX to JFK but stop at PHX on the way (why not?). It calculated it within seconds and gave me a 6 day itinerary; assuming that I started to drive at 9am every morning and stopped at 5pm. It was also smart enough to tell me to check my time whenever I entered a new time zone. Here is a partial screenshot:

I think the route planning capabilities of the software is great. You can easily add stops, and tell the software when you want to be there, how long you’d to like to stop, etc…

It’ll also calculate the cost of the trip for you. You need to enter the MPG for your own vehicle, specify how much gas you’ll have when you start and it will automatically warn you to buy gas. My 6 day trip from LA to NY will cost $228 (that is if you are driving a small Civic like mine).

On screen graphics of Microsoft Streets and Trips may not look as ‘cool’ as the ones in Garmin or TomTom but it sure has more functionality. One of them being the available map styles:
Road map

Terrain Map

Political Map

Road map (Night) – my favorite

Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 software has a lot more functions. You can draw on your map, create pushpins, save your customized maps as files for later retrieval, import addresses from an excel or delimeted file, print your maps and directions (even without the GPS receiver connected). Most of these I haven’t played with just yet.

Driving Directions
I haven’t spent too much time driving with my Microsoft Streets and Trips and Fujitsu P7010 combo yet. I took it out once during the day, once at night.

Here is what the screen will look like when you are getting driving directions:

The green and the red dots are respectively your starting and ending points. The red dot with the red circle around it is where you are currently. The blue line is your route.

The nice thing is that the bottom part of the screen is reserved for driving directions only. The text here is by default a light color on a dark background so it’s really easy to read no matter what kind of light conditions you are in. The little bar near the bottom of the screen tells you how close you are to the next turn. It fills up (just like a download progress bar) as you drive.

The left side of the window has multiple things. At the very top is your latitute and longtitude. Right next to is a nice size compass. On the left side of the compass is your speed. As you can see above my speed was 0 at the time the picture was taken. I was being good.

I found that the speed display was very accurate; showing the exact same speed as my car’s speedometer. But of course there’s a couple of seconds delay.

Still on the left side of the window, you’ll get options for displaying the map.

• Keep position centered
• Use dynamic turn view
• Rotate map to follow travel direction
• Create GPS trail

The two big buttons near the bottom are the ‘repeat instruction’ and ‘turn voice off’.

Pros

• Price – you can’t beat $80
• Screen size – even though my laptop’s screen is only 10.6″ it is still bigger than any navigator’s you can buy
• Media player – since it is on your laptop you can also do DVD’s, MP3’s, pictures, office documents, etc…
• Software – it is higly customizable and smart, better than anything that’ll come with Garmin or TomTom
• Export / Import – all you need is a thumb drive
• Printing – it’ll let you print maps, directions, etc…

Cons

• Battery life – I can go more than 5 hours on my Fujitsu P7010, even that may not be enough for a long road trip. You’ll need a car charger
• Accessibility – I put it on the floor on the passenger side of my car: too far; I also tried the passenger seat: moves around. You will need to buy a laptop mount for your car, or have your girlfriend operate it.
• Safety – Leave your laptop in your car and somebody will break in, they may take your car while they’re at it
• Heat – If you park your car under the sun in the summer the heat will damage your laptop
• Point of interests (POI) – not very up-to-date
• Blue LED on the GPS receiver – can’t be turned off