Travel Guide Microsoft Streets & Trips (2010)

Microsoft Streets & Trips makes trip planning easy, so you can relax and drive with confidence. Whether you are traveling across country or across town, Streets & Trips has the easy-to-use tools to help you get there. Streets & Trips requires no Internet connection and includes more than 1.7 million points of interest to choose from--plus additional listings that you can view when you're connected to the Web. The perfect trip is at your fingertips.


Makes trip planning easy, so you can relax and drive with confidence. Get accurate driving directions to just about anywhere in the United States and Canada. With updated maps and extensive trip planning features, Streets & Trips will help you plan your trip, your way.


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I've used MS S&T since it was initially offered (pre-affordable GPS) and gradually watched it decline in usefulness as the net and technologies evolve. With this current version, even with the few improvements over the 2009 version, I wouldn't recommend it at all to a new user and only would recommend it as an upgrade if your version is more than 2 years old (unless you can find it for less than twenty bucks).

While netbooks (and to some extent the new generation of energy efficient processors just coming out this Xmas) have extended the life of this product, it is just not as functional while traveling as a good GPS unit. I still use it for planning, but more and more I find other online mapping tools more useful as wifi becomes more ubiquitous and 4G broadband adds coverage. The maps are not updated (I find major local errors still uncorrected after 4 years here in Ohio and on a trip to California, numerous serious flaws in Sacramento, the Napa Valley, and the Sonoma Valley - not to mention an abrupt loss of functionality along the way).

I like (and have) the GPS version while on the road at night (using the night map) and also use it while traveling to find side trips of interest (one thing not a strong point of auto GPS devices). But our Garmin GPS is much stronger for routing and seems to have a much better POI dataset. In fact, the online mapping services also have better POI info and MS S&T is unlikely to improve unless it is integrated with Bing or something.

Overall, licensing restrictions (1 machine - should be at least 2 including a laptop/netbook), lack of adequate data revision/updating, and the availability of cheaper GPS units and wifi, I'd say - give this one a pass unless you have a very compelling reason to use it.