Business trips are straightforward: you go to a city, find the client, do your business, and move on. Vacations are entirely different. You still need a general plan, but if you're not willing to throw it out the window to go see something that tickles your fancy, such as the occasional Japanese garden or archaeological site, it's not really a vacation. Those horrible little fold-up paper maps work—sort of—but they are hard to read and don't always have the details you are looking for. Why bother with them when you can use modern, satellite-guided GPS technology that shows you exactly where you are and tells you how to get to where you're going?

On this trip I tested three different GPS software packages: Streets and Trips 2004 from Microsoft, PocketMap Navigator from Space Machine, and Street Atlas USA Handheld from DeLorme. To receive satellite signals, I used a PocketMap CF GPS receiver from Space Machines, and two different Bluetooth GPS devices: an Earthmate Blue LoggerBluetooth Wireless GPS from DeLorme, and a PocketMap Bluetooth GPS receiver from Space Machine. The Bluetooth fairies don't always smile on my efforts to establish a wireless link between two Bluetooth-equipped devices, but when I get it to work, it's wonderful. In the case of Bluetooth-equipped GPS receivers, you don't have to keep your Pocket PC near the windshield. You can even pass it around to other passengers. The CF card GPS receiver soon became just a backup as I got on more friendly terms with the Bluetooth-equipped receivers.

I used a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC as the mother ship for downloading map and routing data from CDs to my Pocket PCs. For Pocket PCs I packed a Toshiba e805 because of its big screen and its two expansion slots. I also used a Dell Axim X30, an HP iPAQ h4150, and toward the end of my journey a Dell Axim X50v. The iPAQ and both Dell units come with both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on board. The SD Bluetooth card had continuous connection difficulties, and I finally abandoned the Toshiba e805 and SD Bluetooth combination.

Streets and Trips

Streets and Trips is Microsoft's trip planning software that includes street-level maps for the U.S. and much of Canada, plus close to two million points of interest to help you find hotels, restaurants, ATM machines, and more. I used Streets and Trips 2004, but the 2005 version is now available.

Streets and Trips is a desktop PC program, but it ships with Pocket Streets, a mobile version of the program that lets you download and view maps on your Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone. The PC version of the program is a powerful and indispensable tool for planning long trips. I used it primarily on my Windows XP Tablet PC, because of the tablet's larger screen and the fact that it can hold more maps than the Pocket PC version. The more recent versions of the program support GPS. If your PC or Pocket PC is connected to a GPS receiver, your current location is displayed on the map in real time.

Streets and Trips maps can be exported to a Pocket PC (top) or to a Smartphone (bottom) and displayed using Pocket Streets.

Once a route is planned on the PC, the maps associated with it can be transferred to a Pocket PC and viewed there. However, Microsoft puts constraints on how much data may be exported to the Windows Mobile device, and these cannot be changed, even if you have plenty of space available on a storage card. The amount you can download is sufficient for routes within a city or for short trips. But it's inadequate for anything over about 200 miles.

Another limitation of Streets and Trips 2004 is that it does not allow you to download corridor maps. For example, you cannot download a strip map of the direct route between Chicago and Kansas City. Maybe this issue has already been addressed in the new Pocket Streets 2005 edition, which I'll test in the future.