CoPilot Live Premium for iPhone

Using sat-nav software on a smartphone rather than an in-car device makes a lot of sense — at least if you already have a smartphone. The software is cheaper than a dedicated device, is much easier to update and the chances are that you always carry your smartphone with you, which means you can make use of its route-planning features even when you’re not driving around.

There are currently two heavyweight sat-nav ‘apps’ available for the iPhone — TomTom Europe and CoPilot Live. CoPilot Live Premium is version 9 of ALK’s popular sat-nav software — or ‘app’ — for iPhone and Android smartphones.

We’ve reviewed the iPhone version, but CoPilot Live Premium for Android its essentially the same app, though it costs £5 more.

Plotting a route

CoPilot Live Premium shares many of the same features as the previous version, but that’s no bad thing — the app was already easy to use, with a clean layout that was easy to read on an iPhone’s 3.5” screen in both landscape and portrait orientations.

The first significant differences pop up when planning a route. In addition to the usual list of saved places, address book and post code searches, CoPilot Live Premium now lets you pick a point on a map as a destination.

Unfortunately, the 2D map display used for this isn’t particularly easy to use. Unlike the iPhone’s Google Maps app, it only displays street names when at a relatively close zoom setting, has no way to search for a town or area to get you started and, since it doesn’t use North as the ‘up’ setting, is somewhat disorientating to use. Map scrolling can also be a little erratic and not particularly smooth, but we’ll give the app the benefit of the doubt here and blame this on the sluggish iPhone 3GS we used for testing.

Once you have chosen a destination and planned a router, CoPilot Live Premium now offers up to two other routes to choose from. How different these are depend on the sensible available roads and routes for a trip to nearest supermarket might only differ by which end of your road you leave, for example.

Similarly useful is the ability to drag the selected route to modify it, but isn’t as flexible as it sounds. Unlike the similar feature at the Google Maps web site, CoPilot Live Premium doesn’t offer a ‘live’ preview of the route as you drag it around, but simply a market that the new route will pass through. So, unless you zoom right into the map and make one small change at a time, it’s easy to inadvertently generate a route that’s vastly different to the one intended, not to mention completely inappropriate.

Getting directions

The main driving display, as already mentioned, is easy to follow, but CoPilot Live Premium now adds another option for spoken directions. In addition to a selection of clear recorded voices (Jane Leeves is still our favourite), there’s now a synthesised voice that speaks road names rather than numbers. This is less pleasant to listen to, but being told to “Turn right onto Green Lanes” can be a little more helpful than a mere “Turn right”, although the literal pronunciation can be confusing at times.

Car, bicycle, motorbike and walking routes are available, but while there’s no caravan option, RV (i.e. motorhome) owners are catered for — albeit without the ability to enter the vehicle size or weight. Still, CoPilot Live Premium does at least allow the priority of different road types (motorways, dual carriageways, local streets) to be adjusted to keep trips as painless as possible.

Other features

CoPilot Live Premium will warn of road congestion when en-route and can automatically re-route accordingly. Getting traffic information before you set off, however, requires a 12-month, £9.99, subscription to the Active Traffic service that uses the smartphone’s mobile internet connection while you’re driving (all maps are stored on the smartphone, however).

As with the previous version of the software, CoPilot Live Premium can show nearby points of interest on the map while you’re driving or stopped (the latter option makes maps easier to read), but there’s now also the option to check Wikipedia for local info, too.

The ability to use a GPS-tagged photo as a destination is a neat tough, too. Most smartphones with a camera and GPS can take these and it means you can navigate to a place based solely on a photo in your smartphone’s album, rather than having to remember exactly where it was.

We’re less convinced by the value of being able to post travel information to Twitter and Facebook, however, but the options are there for people who like to share every movement they make.

Verdict

Existing users of the old CoPilot Live v8 app probably won’t be inclined to upgrade to CoPilot Live Premium, not least since that version of the isn’t going anywhere for the time being and is more than capable at getting people from A to B.

Anyone looking for their first iPhone sat-nav app should find the £20 price tag pretty tempting though, not least since it’s £50 less than the equivalent app from TomTom.