Google Earth is a great application even if you don’t use a GPS device with it. You can look at the landscape and explore the world with a birds-eye view of some excellent and very current earth imagery.
I decided that since I use the application a lot that I would upgrade to the Plus version of Google Earth which has a price-tag of a reasonable $20 annually.
Since my GPS is not of the Magellan or Garmin brands I can’t do the real time GPS tracking that Google Earth Plus would allow me to do. I really don’t have the need to do this real-time tracking on Google Earth, but it would probably be fun to play around with for an hour or two. I’m totally satisfied with importing my data and storing it for later use.
The Plus version of Google Earth doesn’t seem to offer any new features to the program besides the real-time GPS tracking and the ability to print higher resolution maps from the program. Google says that with the $20 subscription you’ll have preferred access to the data servers. To be honest I haven’t really noticed a difference with map data download speeds and Google tells you that the map data is the same for everybody anyways. With no way to confirm that my $20 somehow gives me preferential access rights I’ll just have to trust Google on that one.
While I don’t see much of a difference between the Plus and Free version of the Google Earth program, I’m content in the thought that I made a small donation to Google and that one day my small donation will somehow help them if they ever decide to push MS out of the marketplace.
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