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'CoPilot Live' Turn-by-Turn GPS App Debuts in App Store

thanks for the review. i share many of the same feelings about the app as you do, and hope that the next update gives us a bit more to be happy about. for the price, it's the best out there so far, IMO.

WAY better than the sygic app. i bought this one for a recent trip to AUS/NZ and it mostly worked, but locking onto a gps signal was poor, lagged a lot, and didn't have the iphone features you think should be a part of every app, like finger scrolling, moving maps around, etc.
 
Just a quick tip for everyone that wants to use only GPS chip and no data service, which gives you much more precise tracking.

You have to pop the sim out , in order to solely use the GPS, since putting the phone in the airplane mode will turn off all the antennas. switching the wifi on in airplane mode doesn't do the trick. This is very handy if you are roaming and trying to use your gps and avoiding rediculous att charges.
 
meelash said:
Finally, these GPS apps are starting to come down to reasonable prices. Given that they are not selling any hardware, and the iPhone has built in maps, the prices at which the big companies are trying to sell turn-by-turn is really unsustainable.
If you can buy a standalone unit that includes GPS hardware and SD card storage for only $20-30 more, you know the app is overpriced.
Click to expand...

The iPhone doesn't have built-in maps. It's Google Maps and they load over the network AND they CANNOT be used for turn by turn GPS software so...yeah.
 
I went on a trip yesterday with CoPilot and I now feel pretty confident about my earlier comments concerning this app. First the "bad:"

1.) You're going to find areas where the map is out of date. I've found two local areas where CoPilot will just show you out in a blank area of the map. One is a 15+ year-old mobile home park (with paved, named streets) the other a new commercial/retail area that was finished several years ago. Of course, Google Maps shows both of these areas and even has street views.

2.) Expect the map locations to only be accurate to maybe +/- 50 yards. This can cause problems in urban areas or when streets are closely spaced. The end result is that it may place you on the wrong street or in the wrong location and thus give you incorrect or inappropriate directions. For example, the voice prompt may tell you to make a left turn when the correct direction is to the right (this happened because I'd already made the needed left turn and the next turn -- to the right -- was maybe 30 or 40 yards down the road). I also had one instance where CoPilot showed me traveling down the wrong road in a city location where the two roads ran parallel and were separated by maybe 50 yards.

3.) The voice directions can be misleading because of the accuracy issue discussed in item 2 (above) and because they will sometimes use terms like "turn right" when actually you just need to keep to the right. They may also use the term "turn" when merging onto a highway (although you're unlikely to make a mistake in that situation). Also, because of the accuracy issue the final voice directions may come somewhat late, for example the "just ahead, turn right" voice prompt may come just at or very slightly past the needed turn.

Now for the "good:"

1.) The CoPilot app has only crashed once, and that was during the initial setup of the application. Otherwise, the stability of the application seems okay.

2.) CoPilot does a pretty good job at re-routing your directions if you miss a turn or make the wrong turn. Thus, assuming no other issues it would be pretty hard to get permanently lost while using CoPilot.

3.) You can manually scroll the maps and the graphics response is good (I'm running on a 32GB iPhone 3GS).

4.) The maps are clear and bright. The map interface is fine (IMO). The voice prompts are loud (over the iPhone's speakers) and when played through my car's audio system the quality of the voice is very good.

5.) I've yet to see a case where the routing was completely wrong, although I have seen what I would term "weird" routing.

Final summary:

It's pretty nice for $35 (U.S.) but don't expect it to be a dead accurate, precise GPS solution with fully up-to-date maps. Because of the accuracy limits you need to be careful when starting your route or when in areas of closely spaced streets or turns. The latter is particularly true for the voice prompts which can be misplaced or even totally misleading. Thus, when you are near to a turn or destination reference the map (visually) to determine the "lay of the land" and to see whether you may need to make a few closely spaced turns (the map names the next turn and indicates the left/right direction and distance to the next or following turn).

Overall, it seems to be worth the money and it works fairly well. However, you may be better off using the built-in Google Maps application in some situations (the Maps application seems to have more streets and for some reason it also seems to give more accurate locations -- may have something to do with the WiFi and cell-tower triangulation or maybe the coordinates in the Maps application are better than in CoPilot). Actually, for the start and final end of a trip the Maps application may give better directions as you make those 100ft and 50ft types of turns.

Things that need to be improved:

1.) The map/GPS accuracy. However, I'm thinking that this MAY be tied to the iPhone's GPS and thus there may be nothing that CoPilot can do to make this any better. This issue may, however, be related to the accuracy of the map coordinates in CoPilot since the iPhone's GPS gives raw latitude and longitude (which could be accurate) but if the map coordinates are wrong then you aren't going to be placed correctly in the real world. This would explain why Google Maps seems to more accurately place itself on Google's own maps (because the Google maps have move accurate coordinates, thus the iPhone's GPS may be fine).

2.) It needs text-to-speech so that it can give the street, highway, and exit names. Right now it just says turn right, turn left, keep right/left, and/or exit and a few other voice prompts.

3.) The maps need more recent data. This may only be an issue in residential areas or in fairly new construction, I HOPE that it has the most recent changes to the major highway systems. <Update, I've seen a few user reports that major highway exits are missing from CoPilot, thus the map data may not be that good ("good" being somewhat relative since I doubt that any map will be 100% correct).>

4.) There needs to be a better way of resuming your trip, that is you should be able to quit the CoPilot app and then easily resume your current trip/route. This is pretty important for battery management, since the iPhone's battery will only last one to two hours while the GPS is running. It should remember you last route when you quit and then prompt you to resume when you next launch the application ("Resume previous route, Yes/No?").
 
Even with the review above, I think CoPilot is 10 times better than TomTom. I bought TomTom today and I seriously don't think I will be using it again. It's just to plain and I had to change the maps to several different color combinations before I could easily read the street names.

With CoPilot, everthing is easy to read from street names to the little POI symbols. I tried out CoPilot last night around the city of Broomfield Colorado last night and it was surprising at how much the maps included when TomTom and Sygic and Navigon don't have covered such as mobile home parks mapped out. CoPilot had all of these mapped out. I like all the bright colored maps and it makes it easy to tell highways from regular streets. In TomTom, it looked like the highways had just a very lightly colored border to let you know those were highways.

I also like how CoPilot never failed to list a street name. My Garmin 850 that cost over $500 last year don't do that. It lists maybe 3/4 of the street names, some of them only show when you are traveling one direction down the street but not the other.

Any address that you recently entered goes into it's history so you can go right to it again.

It also looks like the box on the lower left shows your next two turns by showing arrows and distance till that turn but the top arrow didn't appear to be to accurate as it would show that arrow even after I made turns. Maybe I am wrong in how it's suppsed to work though.

A funny thing happened this morning while trying out TomTom. I had set my address as my home location and tapped on the home buttin while parked in my driveway. TomTom actually routed me as going around the block and coming right back around to my home, about a two minute trip even though I was already home. :D

I've tried all of the big GPS apps and I've been dissapointed in all of them except CoPilot. The voice prompts do need some work.

I'm not interested in the music playback while the GPS is running because my iPod Classic plugs into my stereo and plays back through it's touch screen.

I'll rate CoPilot about 4 stars out of 5.
IGO gets 3.5.
TomTom gets 3.
Navigon gets 3
Sygic gets 2
G-Map gets 3
 
Cars with built in GPS tend to turn down the music when giving a direction. I already have a Garmin I can use for voice directions, what I want is the ability to hear these directions while listening to music.

Does this app (or any of the GPS apps) turn down the music to give a direction?
 
Navigon just overlays the directions over the music, and I can hear them fine. I think turning the music down would just be annoying.
 
darwen said:
Cars with built in GPS tend to turn down the music when giving a direction. I already have a Garmin I can use for voice directions, what I want is the ability to hear these directions while listening to music.

Does this app (or any of the GPS apps) turn down the music to give a direction?
Click to expand...

CoPilot announces voice directions along your iPod music, no turning down of volume. I'm satisfied with that.
 
So far so good

I had no problems downloading Co-pilot and loading it onto my iPhone, apart from having to make space on my iPhone [16GB 3G] for the size of the program. No crashes or hanging.

The iPod music plays at the same time through car stereo set up, with voice announcements at a good volume to hear over the music. The display is very nice in 3D mode, although some of the menu selections [such as the keyboard and contact list] look rushed and not as polished as the rest of the program graphics [rushed out to beat Tom Tom perhaps?] I hope so, as it suggests nicer graphics in an update.

My contacts appear to have been loaded automatically. All in all, I am quite happy with my $35 purchase. I don't care if it doesn't announce the names of the streets, as it shows them clearly on the display. It also displays the exit number and street for the next turn. You have lots of display options which is nice as well.

If you miss a stop, or decide not to follow the recommended route, it automatically recalculates your route, so I caught on to my route to work. Thanks god it didn't just say "Hey you missed your turn dummy, turn around" It has a good selection of British voices both male and female but only one of each for American voices [at least in the Canadian version]. Also many foreign language selections, but regrettably no Japanese. :(

I'm not interested in spending a lot of time learning computer gizmo things, and I found the app very intuitive: playing around with it allowed me to figure things out.

All in all, I am extremely happy with the purchase, my wife and I got into some heated discussions trying to find new places using the basic iPhone maps and GPS, this should afford us some roadtrip bliss :cool:
 
The Too Biggies:

Copilot will be great when:
1 - They get current maps. There are areas where I live that are more than 20 years out-of-date. My wife's Garmin and my TomTom stand-alone units have current maps. NO EXCUSE FOR NOT HAVING CURRENT MAPS.
2 - Turn-by-turn (TTS) is included. If you have to be looking at your iPhone in order to know the street name for your next turn, then it is not a good GPS unit regardless of the price.
Come on, Copilot . . . I'm pulling for you. Get the updates to include the above 2 items at a minimum, and you'll have a winner!
 
The maps I have in Michigan are reasonably up-to-date; less than a year, but don't have recent (a month old) road changes (Google maps doesn't either, BTW).

TTS will NOT be included, but a subscription service. I've asked for pricing but in the UK I remember seeing something on the order of $35 for 2 years. According to the ALK web site, this would provide automatic rerouting around jams and road blocks, assuming you have a data connection of some sort.

The customer support seems quite good so far. I got a reply within a few hours to some questions, including the problem that when you receive a call while CP is running, after you're finished with the call, you return to the splash screen and then have to manually exit out of it to return to navigation. This will apparently be fixed in the next update.

The free Live Link location sharing feature had this undocumented complication that your buddy has to first log in and, if not in Europe already, has to go to a preferences setting panel and set the continent and time zone in order to properly map your location:

"If you are showing in Europe it's because you need to go into your
> account settings and change this. Please log in to http://live.alk.com with your CoPilot ID, click MY ACCOUNT and then change the TIME ZONE option
> to your desired time zone."

Also, the choose a destination from the map isn't as helpful as it should be, and just allows you to pick a street, not a POI. The support guy has forwarded this complaint to the software team.


1 - They get current maps. There are areas where I live that are more than 20 years out-of-date. My wife's Garmin and my TomTom stand-alone units have current maps. NO EXCUSE FOR NOT HAVING CURRENT MAPS.
2 - Turn-by-turn (TTS) is included. If you have to be looking at your iPhone in order to know the street name for your next turn, then it is not a good GPS unit regardless of the price.
Come on, Copilot . . . I'm pulling for you. Get the updates to include the above 2 items at a minimum, and you'll have a winner!
Click to expand...
 
ufotofu said:
The maps I have in Michigan are reasonably up-to-date; less than a year, but don't have recent (a month old) road changes (Google maps doesn't either, BTW).

TTS will NOT be included, but a subscription service. I've asked for pricing but in the UK I remember seeing something on the order of $35 for 2 years. According to the ALK web site, this would provide automatic rerouting around jams and road blocks, assuming you have a data connection of some sort.

The customer support seems quite good so far. I got a reply within a few hours to some questions, including the problem that when you receive a call while CP is running, after you're finished with the call, you return to the splash screen and then have to manually exit out of it to return to navigation. This will apparently be fixed in the next update.

The free Live Link location sharing feature had this undocumented complication that your buddy has to first log in and, if not in Europe already, has to go to a preferences setting panel and set the continent and time zone in order to properly map your location:

"If you are showing in Europe it's because you need to go into your
> account settings and change this. Please log in to http://live.alk.com with your CoPilot ID, click MY ACCOUNT and then change the TIME ZONE option
> to your desired time zone."

Also, the choose a destination from the map isn't as helpful as it should be, and just allows you to pick a street, not a POI. The support guy has forwarded this complaint to the software team.
Click to expand...
on their website it looks like they have TTS on some of their newer devices and also have lane assist and other functionalities not currently in the iphone version. i imagine that some or all of these things will be pay services or additions...considering the price of the app, that's not a bad way to market their application. i don't want to pay a subscription for TTS, though, as i'd like to pay a one-time price to have that functionality. hope they offer it soon, though.
 
So if TTS is an additional price is $35 really all that great a price?

Do the other programs include TTS ?

Just curious.
 
Copilot does look very nice indeed, despite it's non-iphone-like interface. The audio feedback for every key pressed is delightful.

If the map is current, if all the road contains speed limit, if the red light camera and speed camera database is up to date, then I would buy it without any second thought.

I like QWERTY keyboard but am even prepared to put up with the lousy ABC keyboard if the above requirements are met.

I don't like TTS and can never stand it. I hate hearing "Middlebrook" pronouced as "Mid-leb-rook", "edgewater" pronounced as "ed-gew-a-ter". Turn that thing off! Just tell me if it is the second road left, or next road left, without making me look for matching road sign.;)
 
Update coming

Just a heads up, I know not a lot of us are happy with this app but it
seems like the update is on it's way, as usual we just have to wait for
Apple's approval process :cool: I can't wait for this app to get better.

Source
 

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