For several years I have been using software from DeLorme which allows me to download maps of areas anywhere in the United States and highway maps of Canada to my PDA. The maps offer detail that can be varied from very coarse to detailed depending on zoom level. The maps also contain a wealth of information about local businesses including restaurants and accommodations. You can display routes with driving directions between two locations on a map. You can also connect to some GPS location devices and have your current position and route, if you are moving, shown on the map. An example of a coarse view is shown in the figure below on the left and a detailed view on the right.

You can click on a street to display the name of the street, the addresses in that particular section of the street and the city, state and zip code. Maps can be stored on memory cards so they do not use up the main memory of your device.

Creating a map requires that you run the application on your desktop or laptop computer and then select the segments you want to transfer to your PDA. An example of this process is in the figure below.

This creates a map file that you can name as you wish and transfer to your PDA.

The PDA requires a viewer, and versions are provided for both Palm OS and Pocket PC devices. For the Palm OS, version 3.5 or higher is required. If you are running Palm OS 5.0 or higher, high-density displays are supported. With Palm OS 5.2 or higher, spoken prompts are available on most devices. The memory required for the viewer is 700 KB without spoken prompts and 1.3 MB with spoken prompts. Map memory is a minimum of 2 MB and can be on a memory card. For the Pocket PC there is support for Pocket PC Phone Edition, Pocket PC 2002 and Windows Mobile 2003, including the portrait, landscape and high-resolution configurations of Windows Mobile 2003 Second edition. The website claims that Windows Mobile 5.0 is not supported, but the application installs and runs perfectly on a Dell Axim x51v running Windows Mobile 5.0 version 5.1.70. On Pocket PC devices, the viewer application requires 1.6MB of memory. The data files are the same as for PalmOS devices.

Examples of the search screen and results of searching for restaurants within two miles of the center of the map are shown in the two figures below. This is a great option when traveling to a city you don't know well.

You can mark waypoints on downloaded maps and also have the PDA version find the best route between locations. This tends to be a lot slower than doing this on a desktop or laptop device. You can beam downloaded maps to others with the software. There are many other features including an option to display sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset times as well as phase for the center location of the map being viewed. The application with viewers for both platforms and the entire map database sells for $39.95. The desktop/laptop application only supports Windows 2000 and XP. More information is available at:

www.delorme.com/streetatlasusahandheld/.