Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gets me where I want to go, 13 Mar 2008
When I upgraded my handset to an O2 Stellar with Windows mobile I arranged to have this included in the upgrade bundle. On that deal it came with an in-car windscreen mount / gooseneck arm.
The co-pilot sat nav software seems to work very well. I cannot say that I have travelled extensively with it yet, but it has got me to exact addresses when necessary.
It allows you to enter a postcode and to save target addresses. It seems to cope well with deviations from the planned route. It has lots of Points Of Interest (POI) loaded.
It also warns of speed camera positions - it seems to be pre-loaded with all the favourite parking places of the mobile safety camera vans too i.e. as you pass under motorway bridges where they sometimes park it will remind you of the fact.
The software is provided on a 1GB memory card, I think I simply installed this and away we went. There's about 0.5Gb spare to use for other things on the provided card.
It also comes with a software DVD that you can load onto your PC - "CoPilot Central". The software installs maps for all the regions onto your PC. It took an absolute age to load onto my laptop (about 20 mins). You use this CoPilot Central software on your PC to keep your phone sat nav up-to-date; whenever you run the program it connects to the internet and checks for updates (possibly map updates, but also new POI, speed camera info, or voices). Then, when you connect your PDA/phone to the PC via USB the CoPilot Central software offers to update it for you.
A point to note on maps and memory usage:
The standard supplied maps of 'UK+Ireland' are supplied on a 1GB memory card (actually a micro-SD, with adaptors for mini-SD and SD), if you add the maps of Europe you will need more than 1GB, so you'll need to install a card with sufficient capacity. NB you can choose to only transfer the sub-regions of Europe that you are interested in e.g. just France, or all except Scandinavia, or Iberia (excluding those last two still resulted in a file larger than 700MB).
When you purchase your map upgrade you will receive an unlock key by email. After you have used CoPilot Central to transfer the additional maps to your PDA/phone it will ask you for the unlock code before allowing you to use them.
The phone sat nav is very effective, intuitive in use, and seems to work very well.
By the way, it also has cycling and walking modes, and seemingly (as it's on your phone) you can use it for walking routes too!!
So far, so good - I'm happy with it.
We're headed for Lake Garda in Italy soon - I'll try to remember to update this review after that trip.
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I've been using CoPilot for a few months now and thought I'd add a bit more info:
1. The CoPilot Central software update system is a bit flakey, only in so far as it is very poor at letting you know what it is up to. You start up and run CoPilot Central on your PC, connect your handset to the PC with a USB cable, and you will find that the status page reports A)"CoPilot Central has detected a compatible device" and B) "Your version of CoPilot is up-to-date". Then, a few minutes later you will undoubtedly see a pop-up that reports "An update is available for your CoPilot Central. Would you like to install now? Doing so will report CoPilot Central." What I find is that this process repeats time and time again. The software version never increases. I can only 'guess' that it is updating data for roads, maps, etc. Just seems a bit poor that they cannot tell you what's actually happening, and that you always get the initial feedback that all is up-to-date, only to be told a few minutes later that you need to update. Anyway, this is what I have found.
2. As mentioned above, we used CoPilot to navigate all the way down to Venice earlier this year. It worked very well. We more or less threw the maps away. Even on the local/small roads. On one particular outing to a small village about 15 miles from our base we could not believe the route that we needed to follow, it was like a rally on country lanes, but CoPilot took us right to our destination.
3. You need to know where you are going, and retain some trust in your own sense over SatNav. I say this because of a few rare mis-guided instances with CoPilot e.g. it does not do tunnels; plainly, as soon as it cannot 'see' the satellites it has no idea where you are. Yet, on one occasion as we emerged from a tunnel through the Swiss Alps, as soon as it picked up the satellites, it commanded take the next right - I 'knew' that we needed to go straight on for another 80 miles to Milan, but like a droid I took the right turn.
4. If it gets you lost, it is excellent at finding your way again. It's somewhat uncanny to be threading your way through small back streets of foreign cities like a local!
5. Door-to-door routes in the UK have been entirely reliable so far. Points of Interest (POI) works really well too. If you are in a strange town and you want to know where the nearest petrol station, supermarket, bowling alley or whatever is it works well.
6. You can change the standard display in all sorts of ways to get a preferred view, colour and supporting data. We drove up to the snow line of Monte Baldi, and CoPilot was able to tell us we had reached an altitude of 4,200ft.
7. We tried the walking mode when we were sight-seeing in Venice. It worked, it found its way around, but the updates were very slow. Oddly we seemed easily able to walk ahead of it (obviously travelling much more slowly than you do in your car). I found myself holding it high in the air trying to force get a position update. I don't think you could rely on it.
8. CoPilot stores all your journeys, and you can upload them to your PC if you wish. This would probably develop into a fascinating map of your travels over time.
All in all, I am still amazed that I can do all of this with my 'phone' and am happy to commend it to all.
(With regard the looping, continual updating - CoPilot Central on my PC has updated seven times whilst I have typed the additions above. I can't help but think that I have something set wrong ......)
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great update to an already great product, 16 May 2008
I used version 6 for over a year and found it invaluable. This update brings improved visuals, updated maps, faster route computation and heaps more options.
Money well spent. If you've got a phone with Windows Mobile then this will add the GPS functions you need.
Looking forwards to version 8 (though I'm not sure what else they can improve!)
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2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unreliable and incompatible, 30 Sep 2008
CoPilot 7 could be a really good satnav solution. Unfortunately, I've found it to be unreliable. I do a lot of mileage and thought I'd give it a go after several years of using TomTom. Some of the problems I've encountered so far:
- With traffic updates enabled, the PDA application crashes regularly if it has any problems with the data connection. I have yet to complete a journey without it crashing several times - fine if you like fidling with your PDA whilst driving but the police may not agree with you
- The CoPilot icon disappears from the windows mobile Today screen regularly so when the software crashes, it is dangerous to restart as you need to dig around the menus while driving...
- CoPilot Live just did not work out of the box. After locating and downloading an updated version, it kind of works but is unreliable and not compatible with Vista x64.
- The routing is far from optimal
- When trying to avoid a traffic incident it proposes one alternative and that's it.
- The software only gives one route based on routing preferences (these are a great feature), so if you don't like that route, tough.
- There are a number of map inaccuracies that mean I don't trust the software any more
- CoPilot tried to get me to turn onto dual carriageways from bridges above them on several occasions - it needs to understand the concept of slip roads...
- CoPilot doesn't understand the difference between "bear right" (or left) and "turn right" (or left) and this can be very treacherous on the roads.
Don't bother with ALK support either. If they call you and for some reason you can't get to the phone straight away, you get a voice mail asking you for an alternative contact number as the one they've called is obviously not good enough. Pathetic.
Overall, I liked the application at first but I am less than impressed. It seems that ALK released a beta version and doesn't want to acknowledge it. I was fed up with TomTom for many reasons but at least it worked and was reliable.
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