Microsoft Streets & Trips 2003 Expands Coverage

Oct. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today released Microsoft Streets & Trips 2003 mapping software, the latest version of the No. 1-selling travel product for three years running. Microsoft's mapping solution continues to raise the bar on ease of use and comprehensive content, now providing effortless access to more than 6.7 million miles of U.S. and Canadian streets and highways and more than 1 million points of interest.

Streets and Trips 2003, based on Microsoft MapPoint technology, offers travelers pinpoint accuracy for planning a trip, locating an address or calculating driving directions, as well as fun new personalization features. Streets & Trips also offers a level of mobility that online travel resources can't match, because it's designed to run on any Windows-based PC or laptop and provide fast, easy access to maps without requiring an Internet connection. Streets & Trips also includes Pocket Streets, which lets consumers export street-level maps and points of interest lists to a Pocket PC.

"Usability makes all the difference in how well a mapping solution meets travelers' needs, and our extensive expertise in that arena is a large part of why Streets & Trips has been popular from the beginning," said Michael Graff, general manager of the MapPoint Business Unit at Microsoft. "By providing intuitive access to comprehensive and reliable map data, Streets & Trips makes it fun for travelers to hit the road."

All-in-One Solution Features More Content, More Points of Interest
Microsoft recognizes that traveling by car continues to be a popular way to see North America, whether that means a house-hunting expedition in a new neighborhood, a weekend getaway to enjoy fall foliage, a business conference in an adjacent state or a cross-continent family road trip. Streets & Trips lets home PC users explore with confidence by wrapping easy-to-use features, excellent, up-to-date map data and extensive trip-planning technology into a comprehensive, value-priced software package.

Microsoft added more than 300,000 miles of streets and highways to the 2003 edition of Streets & Trips, giving travelers seamless access to top-quality, detailed street-level maps and door-to-door driving directions throughout the United States and Canada.

Microsoft also beefed up the points of interest database in Streets & Trips by 25 percent. Travelers can now zero in on more than 1 million visitor sites and amenities along their route, including historical landmarks, museums, parks, golf courses, campgrounds, RV parks, restaurants, hotels and motels, theaters, banks and ATMs, airports, gas stations, libraries, shopping centers, sports stadiums, and hospitals.

Streets & Trips supports National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) 2.0-compliant global positioning system (GPS) devices, so users can always find and track their exact location anywhere in North America.

Customized Trip-Planning and Travel
Streets & Trips puts an array of intuitive trip-planning and travel tools within easy reach. A rich Windows-based application, it offers the same familiar style of interface and consistent drawing tools as products in the Microsoft Office suite. Streets & Trips also caters to users' individual travel needs by allowing fast panning and zooming, editing of routes, and annotation of maps. Features such as "sounds like" address searching and Microsoft's patented snap-routing technology make common tasks easier to complete.

New personalization features in Streets & Trips include an icon function that lets users add custom bitmap images to a map. Travelers also have a choice of more than 300 pushpin symbols for customizing maps to their liking.

Maps produced in Streets & Trips can be printed, downloaded to a Pocket PC for portability or published to the Web using the "Save as Web Page" feature.

Travel With Ease, With or Without the Benefit of the Internet
Online mapping tools, including Microsoft's own MSN MapPoint Web portal, are good resources for some travel purposes, but Streets & Trips offers the advantage of a mapping solution that works whether or not a user is connected to the Internet. Whether travelers opt to use a desktop PC, a laptop or a Pocket PC device, Streets & Trips provides full access to their maps without their having to go online. When users do go online, they can download the latest road construction information to update their maps.

In addition, having all map data in one file that can either be installed on a user's hard disk or run from a single CD reduces the frustration of having to install additional maps or swap disks.

Pricing and Availability
Microsoft Streets & Trips 2003 is available now for an estimated retail price of $34.95 (U.S.) and $49.95 (CDN) or less after applicable mail-in rebate offers (valid in the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada). European editions of the software, called AutoRoute 2003, will be released in six major languages by the end of October 2002.

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Source: Microsoft Corp.