CoPilot Live North America – iPhone App Review

CoPilot Live North America ($34.99)

Version – 8.0.0.469

REVIEW – “Real GPS at an affordable price point!”

There has been a lot of hype around GPS apps for the iPhone.  Most of us don’t really want to add another monthly fee on top of their regular cell phone bill to use it though.  Fortunately there are several apps available that don’t have a monthly subscription fee and some of them are priced very competitively.  That is definitely the case for ALK Technoligies,. CoPilot Live!

The first thing that I noticed about this app is that the interface looks really sharp.  I really liked all of the icons and it was easy to tell what was going on.  There is only one voice for text-to-speech and it’s not an extremely smooth one, but I was able to easily tell what was being said.  As with many GPS apps it does take a few seconds for it lock on and get a strong signal, but once it does it is pretty accurate for the most part.

When you open this app you are greeted by the map with a menu overlaying it to select what you want to do.  The menu that comes up at startup is pretty neat, it is unfortunate that there is no way to pull this simplified menu back up once you have closed it.  That being said you can access a full screen menu with many more options by touching the “Menu” button in the bottom left corner.

One feature that I thought was pretty cool was that you don’t have to go into the menu and open up another map to scroll around and look at things.  All you have to do is touch and drag the screen around.  You can also view information about Points Of Interest (POI’s) by just touching their icons on the screen.  This brings up a box that shows all of the POI’s for the location you selected and once you select the one you want you can call it directly.

Another great feature that I was able to test is CoPilot Live’s “Premium Live Services.”  These are not included in the apps $34.99 price, but for just $19.99 a year you get several features that are not included in even the most expensive GPS apps.  Included in Premium Live Services is the ability to get live traffic updates, fuel prices and search POI’s using CoPilots “Live Search” feature.  This allows you to search for what you are looking for such as “coffee,” “hamburger,” or “iPhone” and you will get a list of locations where you can find your search query.  I was actually fairly impressed with how well these features worked  While not all of the gas stations around had prices listed in it, the ones that were listed were fairly accurate.

Another great feature of CoPilot is that it lets you plan your trips with stops and everything in advance.  This means that if you know you will be stopping somewhere to eat, you can simply include that in your trip and your directions will take you to where you are going to eat first, and then to your destination without you having to reset it! This

Something that any GPS app that I use needs to have is iPod controls. It is just far to irritating to have to exit out of the app that is giving you directions and open up the iPod app to switch to a new song. The iPod integration in this app is one of the best that I have seen. One negative that I will note is that the iPod screen does not show your list of Podcasts, but unfortunately this seems to be the case in most other GPS apps that include iPod integration. If you are listening to something and the app needs to give you directions your music will smoothly fade out and pause and then resume playing once the directions have been given.

Overall I found that the performance of this GPS app was above average as far as response times for the GPS, feature set, and route accuracy.  And if you happen to be looking for an app that supports live traffic updates this is about the only app that does it, and it does it for an extremely reasonable price.  The developer of this app has already released several updates and has more planned in the future, so if you have been holding off on GPS apps because of the steep price and lack of features, CoPilot Live may be the solution you’ve been looking for.  So what are you waiting for?  Go check it out today!

- David H.

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Developer – ALK Technologies, Ltd.

URL: http://www.alk.eu.com/copilotlive/iphone/

DEVELOPERS NOTES

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© 2009, Davidh. All rights reserved.