Review by Jerry Saperstein

I’ve been a Streets & Trips user since the program was introduced.

It has never been tops in its class, but it was superior to similarly priced products like Delorme’s.

With S&T 2009, however, Microsoft falls behind the curve in terms of user interface, map accuracy, technology and, importantly, customer care.

The customer care aspect is perhaps the most important. S&T is great for trip planning. However, Microsoft now restricts installation to two computers, which was not the case with earlier versions. Likewise, there is no option to deactivate the program, a la Adobe, prior to installing on another computer. As far as I can determine, once you install it on two computers, you’re stuck unless you call Microsoft’s Asian-based customer service and manage to beg another registration code, such as when you replace one of the computers.

This is simply a bad business model, in my opinion.

Next, the maps are increasingly outdated. I checked the restaurants around my home and they are at least three years or more out of date. From reading Amazon reviews, I picked up some roads in the Chicago area that others claimed weren’t on the map, though they have been in place for a long time. The critics are right: even a major expressway extension that was completed several years ago isn’t on the maps.

Sure, Microsoft licenses the maps from a cartographic compiler, but you’d think they’d exercise more quality control on behalf of their customers and demand more up-to-date maps.

Nope.

Finally, on my list of major deficiencies, is the interface. It really isn’t much different than prior years and is simply growing stale. Three keystrokes to update the route directions from the GPS is too much.

Overall, S&T 2009 is as good as it ever was - and that’s the problem: it isn’t changing much from past versions and it does not help that the maps are so outdated. The clumsy attempt to force the user to purchase a copy for every computer they might run it on is ridiculous: the basic license should cover at least two computers. Even Adobe is that liberal.

Jerry