Delorme could be in trouble unless they really get their act together and decide just what their mission is in this market. Magellan? Are there any other players in North America? Edited Octoby dakboy
Plus, I feel their products are overpriced & they're taking advantage of their position as the 800 pound Gorilla in this product space (OTOH, I love my ForeRunner 405). I don't get a warm fuzzy feeling about Garmin, with all the reports of half-baked firmware releases I read here. I almost certainly won't be buying DeLorme again, if they even have a product to buy. When my PN dies, I'm not sure what I'll do. Maybe they make so much money on their professional-grade products that they can treat the consumer market as a hobby and nothing more. Paper atlases? How many of those are they even selling? The PN-30 was more or less abandoned within a year of release. IIRC Street Atlas 2012 was a flop, and the expected successor to TopoNA 9 is long overdue. Now they're falling even farther behind on their old mainstays. Cache Register has been broken on OS X for over a year - no new release to fix anything. People kept claiming "Apple broke it, it's their fault" until finally a firmware update was released - because DeLorme's firmware wasn't handling the USB connections properly, and Lion required that devices adhere more strictly to the established standards. For 5 months, users of PN-40s with Macs running Lion couldn't even connect their devices to their computers. I gave up entirely when it became clear that they had lost all interest in supporting their existing customers who didn't use Windows, after initially making some positive moves toward supporting MacOS. Then I got a Droid, and it kind of became redundant. I lost interest due to the increased download time. It got too big and rather than expand capacity, they chose to start throttling downloads heavily. I suspect the Map Library has become a victim of its own success, and then the smartphone boom.
They're a small company, and their business model has been changing rapidly over the past 4 years, away from their traditional products which were probably seeing a slowdown in sales and toward a subscription-based constant revenue stream.
Not everyone buys the latest & greatest release every year. So is software like StreetAtlas, XMap & Topo. The InReach, being a subscription service, is a revenue stream.
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