Whether you're visiting a new client for an hour or heading out on the road for a week, knowing where you're going is a fundamental necessity in your day-to-day activities. Once upon a time we all carried paper maps that never seemed to fold up properly and always seemed full of outdated information.
In today's electronic world there are a variety of alternatives to those paper maps. You can read maps on your PDA, laptop or Internet-enabled phone, print them from a Web site, or have a GPS unit track your movements as you go. In short, the offerings are vast and various. This month I took a closer look at Delorme Solus Pro 2, a robust offering from the maker of paper maps and atlases and computer software. Although Solus Pro 2 is intended primarily for Palm handhelds, I discovered that it can be effectively used on desktop and laptop systems as well.
Experimenting with Solus 2 revealed an extensive, rich feature set for mobile navigators. The software's vector-map technology allows you to locate individual addresses, contacts and specific points of interest by searching by city, state or ZIP code on a Palm device. You also can create and customize maps on your desktop and laptop, or use Solus in conjunction with a GPS unit. Solus 3, introduced last fall at the Internet World trade show, also will feature wireless map access.
Outstanding features in Solus 2 include address-book record importing, map marking, zoom, and preference customization. My favorites are address-book imports and map marking. You can import existing addresses from your contact records and place them on your maps. This is very handy when heading to a new client's office or to a series of client addresses. You can also mark a map at any time by tapping the mark icon located on the map screen, and enter pertinent information about the mark such as address, phone, and notes.
The maps can be zoomed in or out using the up and down hardware keys of your Palm. Depending on zoom level, you'll see street names and areas of interest such as parks and hospitals. Other hardware keys activate more program features; by going to Preferences you can configure one or all of the Palm hardware keys to perform various functions on your map, such as display directions, show turns, display written directions, and start or stop GPS tracking. These shortcuts save a lot of time when you're on the move in unfamiliar territory.
Map features can also be customized by making selections in Preferences, showing as much or little detail as you like. Latitude and longitude details can also be displayed on the main map for either your current location or the location of a specific mark you have placed. I tend to get turned around easily, so another one of my favorite features is the orientation preference. The program can display "up" as north, or as the direction in which you're traveling.
Moving around the map requires just a simple tap action. You tap your stylus on the screen in the direction you'd like to go, or tap and drag the stylus to move longer distances around the map.
The desktop software allows you to create and customize maps as needed. The software logs you online and connects you to the Solus Web site. There you customize the map area, place marks for later reference, and create routes with directions. Once you have the map details you want, you type in a name for the map and click a button. The software then downloads the new map to your Palm with marks and routes intact. You can choose to download the overview map only, or download the step-by-step directions as well. Laptop users and those who feel lost without paper maps can print the customized maps and carry them along.
The only extra feature I would like to see added to this tool is a traffic and road report such as that found at Mapquest.
