I've owned a Casio E-100 PDA for over a year now. I love the color screen and long battery life. Pocket Streets software makes my Casio incredibly useful, and makes my Palm-carrying colleagues with green with envy.

Pocket Streets is a versatile map display program. It includes a search function that lets me find a street address or landmark quickly. I can then mark the location with a pushpin for later reference.

The color display on my PDA provides an easily readable handheld map. The large memory space on Windows PDAs provides more detail and larger maps than any Palm software. I have half a dozen custom maps loaded in my flash memory card, including a 50 square mile map of my home city. I can find almost any address on my PDA, while my colleagues must use a Web browser to look up the information online.

If you buy Microsoft Streets and Trips or MapPoint software, you can quickly create a Pocket Street map for any area of the US and Canada. Microsoft also has versions of this software for the UK and Western Europe. The US version of Streets and Trips can be found for $10-20 with a rebate included on the package. When I travel, I create a custom map and add the landmarks I need - hotel, restaurants, offices, and other information.

Pocket Streets does not provide routing, so you can't easily load a set of directions on the map. It does not directly support a GPS system. This makes the software less useful for long automobile trips. However, the printed maps that MapPoint can generate go well beyond what any PDA can deliver.

Microsoft includes a free version of Pocket Streets with Windows PDAs, and also allows downloads at http://www.microsoft.com/pocketpc/downloads/streets.asp. The free version can display Microsoft's maps for about 20 major downtown areas in the US and Western Europe.



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