(sponsor)
Lately, the trend in GPS
INTRODUCTION
Navigation programs seems to be headed towards
removing important features instead of fixing bugs,
improving functionality, and increasing usability. I
don't know why so many Navigation program companies
are doing this. It makes upgrades feel a lot more
like downgrades. Do they think we won't notice?
Anyway, CoPilot Live has always been one of the most
feature-rich GPS Navigation programs for Windows
Mobile. It does things none of the others can do.
Let's find out what they've added to CoPilot Live
version 7 and what they've removed.
The things I like most in the new CoPilot
WHAT’S HOT
Live 7 is the free traffic updates and rerouting
along with the theme support. Unfortunately no other
themes are available and there's no documentation
regarding creating your own themes at this time. The
"Live" tracking and communications features are
still there and they're still excellent. You've also
got a newly redesigned interface that's similar to
TomTom with its big finger-friendly buttons (which
is not necessarily a good thing).
What's nice about CoPilot Live is there
SETUP
are a couple different setup options. It comes with a 2GB MicroSD card
with MiniSD and SD adapters, so if you just want to hit the road and run
right now, all you have to do is put the memory card into your Windows
Mobile device. It doesn't matter if it's Professional (touch screen) or
Standard (no touch screen), CoPilot will automatically install the
proper version and you'll be guided through the set-up steps below.
That's the quick and easy way. If you're a little more adventures,
you can install CoPilot Central off the DVD. This will give you much
more control over what map data gets installed (if you only need a
certain area) and you can load everything on a larger capacity memory
card along with your music/video files. This is a really excellent
solution and I'm glad CoPilot Live implemented their software
installation process this way.
As soon as you insert
the memory card, the installation process begins.
The software requires 8.34MB of storage to install.
After installation is completed, you’ll notice a "CoPilot"
item on your Today Screen. Activating that will
launch CoPilot Live. I usually turn this Today
screen item off pretty quickly. It's a pretty big
waste of space.
You’ll have to look at this screen for a while
before the software loads. I don’t know how they
knew what kind of car I drive.
Next I must enter my product key. After
entering the key and pressing "Next" the software
seems to freeze up, but be patient.
Eventually the above screen will appear and take you
through the rest of the activation process.
Then, you’re asked to set the language, voice, and
units.
Lastly, there’s a big warning that you have to
accept.
POCKET PC FEATURES
A big "Tips and Tricks" screen comes up when
launching.
After closing the Tips and Tricks, you get to this
screen and you hear the voice say "Welcome to
CoPilot". This will become pretty annoying.
There’s no option in the settings to shut off the
voice, but you can disable it by renaming the
"cpwelcomelive.ogg" file in: Storage
CardCopilotSPEECHen-usLisa.
The Destination button gives you two screens of
destination options. Choosing "Home" or "Work" the
first time will let you set up those addresses.
Subsequent presses of those buttons will quickly set
those destinations and calculate driving
instructions respectively.
Entering an address in CoPilot Live is marketed as
being easy, but it really isn’t. Like most GPS
Navigation programs, you have to enter the City or
Zip Code first, then the street name, then the house
number or intersection. That’s a lot of work.
Furthermore, CoPilot defaults to this alphabetic
keyboard that’s impossible to type on. You can
change to a Qwerty layout in the settings, but I
would MUCH rather be able to use a decent
touch-screen keyboard like Cootek’s TouchPal.
Unfortunately, the standard Windows Mobile Software
Input Panels are completely disabled in CoPilot
Live. A much easier method of entering addresses
would be the ability to copy/paste (or type) an
entire address into just one text field then let the
software recognize what the zip code, city name,
street name, and house numbers are based on their
locations and contents within the text field. Why
should I have to do all the work?
The POI destination button lets you search the
Points of Interest database based on categories and
names.
The Favorites option lets you quickly select a saved
location as your destination. These do not seem to
be synchronized with the CoPilot Central desktop
application for some reason.
The "Recent" destinations option gives you quick
access to recent destinations that you’ve already
entered.
The Contact option for destinations works much much
faster than Tom Tom 6. However, it can only
search by the contact’s last name. Also, if the
contact’s address is not found in the map set loaded
on your device, it asks you for the zip code of the
address instead of notifying you that the address
cannot be found on your map set. It also has a
lot of trouble recognizing street addresses if you
have an apartment number listed in your contacts. To
be fair, I’ve never seen a GPS program that could
read those types of contact addresses correctly.
You can also just pick your destination on the map.
This option can be pretty tedious.
The Intersection destination option is the same as
the address option except instead of entering a
house number, you enter a second street name. The
software lists all the streets that intersect with
the first street chosen.
The last destination option lets you enter latitude
and longitude coordinates in a number of different
formats. This is great for Geocaching and rescue
missions.
After setting a destination, CoPilot will calculate
a route.
Pressing "Preview" will give you some options to see
details on the route.
Pressing the "Routing" button will let you change
some route options should you decide you would like
to take the scenic route for example. Changing the
vehicle type will also change what type of roads
you’re recommended to be on.
Pressing the "Drive" button will bring you to the
navigation screen and will direct you which way to
go as you travel.
Tapping the bar on the lower right brings up a menu
where you can choose what type of data you want that
lower right bar to display.
When stopped, points of interest appear on the map.
Tapping them brings up a dialog. If there’s more
than one you are given a list.
Selecting a POI shows you the address and phone
number. You can also choose to add the location as a
stop or easily call the location. This makes it very
easy to order take out before you get there, or make
reservations.
Tapping the "Menu" button in the lower left brings
up 3 pages worth of screens. The Destination button
brings you to the destination screens previously
covered.
Tapping the "Nearby POIs" icon brings you to a list
of categories that you can choose from. Once you
press a category name, the software will search for
the specified POI's near your current location and
list them in order of proximity.
The "Detour" button lets you avoid certain roads,
traffic congestion, or create an alternate route.
The "Driving Views" button lets you change the way
the map and turn data is displayed while a route
navigation is in process.
The "Traffic" button let's you see what traffic
incidents are listed in the area along your route or
in a City. Traffic can be downloaded via TMC or GPRS
depending on your hardware.
You can show the traffic incidents in a list as
above.
As you're driving, traffic alerts will appear and
you can decide which ones you want to ignore or
avoid. This step is necessary since some of the
alerts specify road construction or exit closings
that may not really cause traffic or affect your
route.
You can also show traffic incidents on the map. They
show up as an exclamation point in a triangle. I
wish the traffic mapping was more like Windows Live
Search or Google Maps which show highlighted colors
along the entire road where the traffic is slow or
stopped.
The "Plan or Edit Trip" button lets you add or
remove stops along the way. You can also load and
save trips from here.
After you load a trip, you may be asked about your
start location and where you want to go to first.
The Settings section gives you four screens of
large-button settings control panels. Even though
(or because) this is a "Finger-friendly" interface,
it's very difficult to find the thing you want to
change.
Here you can see the Map settings.
The "Map Styles" option lets you change the map
colors for both Day and Night modes. CoPilot Live
now includes an Automatic switching between day and
night modes based on the time of day. This is
something that iGuidance has always done quite
nicely.
The Volume control is also buried here in the
settings menu. If you want to mute the voice prompts
in the car, it's very difficult to do.
The GPS button in the Settings screen brings you to
five more big buttons that let you setup the GPS, see
the GPS status (showing how many satellites you have
connected), reset the GPS, track playback, and turn
receiving off.
The track playback option lets you re-enact
navigation trips that you may have made.
The POI's settings page lets you turn on POI Alerts
which you can have announced along your route. This
is useful if you want to see notifications of each
restaurant you might pass along the way.
The Driver Safety settings give you some options for
using the driver safety map view.
You can change the language and voice in the
"Language and Speech" settings dialog.
Unfortunately the Text-to-Speech voice option is no
longer available. You can only choose from
pre-recorded OGG files now.
The Device settings page lets you change the
keyboard layout. It does NOT let you use any of the
standard Windows Mobile software input panels
however. This is very unfortunate as there are much
better on-screen keyboards available. You can
also change the backlight settings here. I like the
"On Near Turn" option so that the backlight will go
off when you don't really need to see it.
You can set some traffic update settings here. Note,
CoPilot supports both GPRS and TMC sources for
traffic information.
In order to use the "Live" features, you have to set
up your account information here.
The "Themes" option is a welcome addition
considering how the default CoPilot skin clashes so
much with the Windows Mobile themes. Unfortunately there are no other themes to choose
from at the current time. Also there is no
documentation for creating your own themes.
When you receive a new message, an envelope icon
appears in the lower right and you hear "New Message
Received"
If you try to use CoPilot Live's "Live" features on
another device, it gives you an error. I don't
know how to switch my "vehicle" account to a
different device. The software is uninstalled
on my other device, so it's not clear how to do
this.
You can send a "Live" tracking invitation to people
via email. Unfortunately, you can not choose
some one from your address book. You also can't
switch to your contacts program in order to find a
person's email address that you might want to
copy/paste here (where's the Start menu??)
Even if you could copy the email address from
somewhere else, there's no way to paste it here.
Tap & hold does not bring up a context sensitive
menu with a Paste option as you would expect. This
is pretty obviously very bad design.
On the other end, the user who you've sent a
tracking invitation to will receive a link and
password to log into the above web page where s/he
can see your location, send you messages with
multiple choice answers and send you suggested
stops.
Receiving messages on the Pocket PC shows large
"finger friendly" buttons that you can use to
respond. In older versions that supported
text-to-speech, these messages would have been read
to you. Unfortunately, this feature is no longer
available.
CoPilot will calculate a new route if you accept a
destination remotely.
The last menu screen shows options for Tips &
Tutorials, "Play Demo", Hide CoPilot and Quit
CoPilot. The "Hide CoPilot" option is an
attempt at bringing the minimize function to the
program. Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to
get to. The good news is that the OK hardware button
will minimize the application. The "Quit"
option is also buried here and takes a while to find
when you want to close CoPilot.
In this video we see
CoPilot Live 7 running along side iGuidance v2.0 in
New York City.
(sponsor)
CoPilot Live 7 now includes both a Windows Mobile
SMARTPHONE/STANDARD VERSION
Professional and Standard (Smartphone) versions. The
memory card will automatically detect your operating
system and install the proper application.
goes to the default map screen.
If you get the CoPilot Live 7 Bluetooth bundle, you
also receive a nice little SIRF Star 3 Bluetooth GPS
receiver.
Setup on the Smartphone version is very similar to
the Pocket PC version.
The Smartphone version shows numbers next to each
menu item so you can easily activate them with your
hardware keys.
The "Menu" uses large buttons, graphic icons, and
numeric identifiers to activate commands. There's
really no need for large buttons on a
Standard/Smartphone device. I think the added space
would have been better used by more menu items and a
standard Windows Mobile list of commands.
Since my Smartphone didn't have a Built-in GPS
receiver, I had to go to the "Setup GPS Receiver"
control panel to connect to the Bluetooth receiver.
The interface for the Smartphone version is a lot
nicer in my opinion. It has the softkeys at the
bottom and numeric labels on the zoom keys.
Entering a destination is actually easier on the
Smartphone version since the xT9 input option is
still available and auto completes what you type.
The navigation screen shows your route in green
after setting a destination.
When CoPilot Live is running, you see an icon in the
title bar next to the battery icon.
It's impossible to figure out
what the points of interest are on the map in the
Smartphone version.
COPILOT CENTRAL
(all images link to higher resolution)
Updates are pretty simple when they work.
An excellent feature of CoPilot Central is the
ability to plan a trip on the desktop computer. Then
you can send the trip data to your Pocket PC's
storage card and load it when you're ready to go.
This comes in very handy for planning a trip with
many stops.
Like the Windows Mobile counterpart, the "Find a
Location" dialog requires you to type each little
piece of information separately. You can't
just paste an address here and search for it like
you would with Windows Live Search or Google Maps.
You can create map data for your device based on
region, country, area selection or radius.
Unfortunately the feature for creating map data
based on a trip route corridor has been removed.
The "CoPilot Online" section lets you download
software updates as well as purchase other map data
sets. This is very similar to what TomTom has done
with their desktop software.
(sponsor)
Alk has a support page for CoPilot Live 7 that lists some
HELP SUPPORT
frequently asked questions, a link to the user
manual, and a link to contact support.
The Tips & Tutorials
section in CoPilot offers some instruction for
helping you learn how to use the software.
Unfortunately, once you've started a tutorial
(right), there's no way to get out of it or go back
to a previous screen. That's a pretty huge design
flaw.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
CoPilot Live 7 software requires a mobile device running Windows Mobile
2003, 5.0 or 6 (Professional or Standard), 8MB available program memory,
10MB application memory, Built-in GPS or Bluetooth GPS hardware, and a
memory card slot (MicroSD, MiniSD, or SD). You will also need a data
plan if you want to use the Live Traffic or Tracking features.
If you want to use the CoPilot Live Central desktop
software you'll need Windows 2000/XP/Vista, DVD ROM,
Activesync 4.1 or memory card reader, Internet
access, 4Gb of hard disk space, and a 1024×768 or
higher screen resolution.
BUGS AND WISHES
the unreliable map data. My parent’s address isn't
even in there and that house has been there for
centuries. CoPilot also sometimes directs me down
streets that don't really exist (see below). When I
was on the West Side Highway in New York City, it
directed me to get off one of the exits and then
immediately get back onto the same highway. That
route really didn't make any sense. Another time
when driving back from Paintball on Long Island, the
software directed us to drive down a dirt road. My
friends laughed at my poor little Windows Mobile
device and suggested that I switch to the "good
software" instead. It was a bit embarassing.
The next biggest problem is the voice prompts. Just
before you need to make a turn, the software's voice
says "Just ahead turn left". The problem is
that it doesn't give you enough notice. Usually, by
the time you hear "Just ahead" you are actually at
the turn you're supposed to make. Then when you hear
"turn left", you've already passed the turn you were
supposed to make. This does not happen all the time
mind you. I'm not sure if the flaw is that this
voice prompt begins at a certain distance from the
turn and does not take into account your current
speed or what. It may not be a problem if you
keep looking at the screen and listen for the "One
Tenth of a mile" voice prompt, but really you should
not be relying on the screen if you're driving.
Another annoying thing about the voice prompts is
that instead of saying "In three tenths of a mile
turn left", it says "In three tenth of a mile turn
left." That's right, it sounds like it's got a
lisp. Did I mention the text-to-speech feature is no
longer available?
Let me back up a little bit for this next bug…
There are three very important things that I need my
mobile device to do while in the car:
- Play music
- Tell me how to get to my destination
- Allow me to make and answer phone calls
Now this next bug affects
number 1. While CoPilot Live is running, and Windows
Media Player is playing music in the background, the
tracks do not auto-advance in a timely fashion.
There is a HUGE delay between tracks while CoPilot
is running. If you switch to Media Player with a
hardware button, the music will start playing again,
but… Here's the next bug… The hardware buttons
for advancing and rewinding tracks don't work while
CoPilot is running in the background.
The GPS positioning
seems to be less accurate than some other navigation
programs. CoPilot Live tends to assume you're taking
the route it specified for far too long. Seen here,
the software wants us to turn left, but as you can
see we're actually on a highway. Also note the
traffic icon on the screen and we are, in fact, in
traffic.
Here's an interesting
bug in one of the traffic reports. What's an Iound?
Here's another flaw in
the map data. You can see that the route wants us to
go passed the current intersection and make a sharp
left onto "Young Avenue". In reality, there's
no road there! There's a huge cliff and a
carpet store there. There's no way a road was ever
located in that position.
There's also a nice bug in
the CoPilot Central desktop software that keeps
making you restart the program in order to "update
the software." This just puts you in an endless
loop. The CoPilot Central software also no longer
let's you create map data based on a trip corridor.
This was an excellent and unique feature of CoPilot
Live, and it's sad to see it go. I guess that's not
a bug since it was by design though.
As for wishes…
- I wish they had implemented the Windows Mobile 5.0/6 softkey menus so that you could interact with the
software using hardware buttons. - I wish the interface was designed to match
Windows Mobile more instead of clash with it. - I wish the start menu and title bar were
accessible at least when stopped. - I wish the interface was more accessible with
the keyboard. - I wish I didn't have to enter each piece of the
address individually. - I wish it integrated with Microsoft Voice
Command for voice recognition and text-to-speech. - I wish traffic congestion was displayed more
like Windows Live Search or Google Maps. - I wish it would tell me which side of the street
my destination is on.
PURCHASING
CoPilot Live 7 from Alk's CoPilot Store for $99 if you just want the
software DVD and memory card, or $199 if you want
the software DVD & memory card as well as a
Bluetooth GPS receiver with car mount and car
charger. CoPilot Live used to cost $199 just for the
software… and that's just for one version. If you
wanted to switch between Windows Mobile Professional
or Standard edition, you had to buy a
different version. The pricing is much more
competitive since now it costs the same as the other
top GPS Navigation programs.
PROS
Free live traffic
Easy install with 2GB Memory
card
Optional
DVD install
CoPilot
Central can manage/sync trip data, create custom map
data sets
Both
Windows Mobile Pro and Standard versions included
Theme
feature now available
Backlight
on during turns option
POI alerts
along route
CONS
Map data
not reliable
Voice prompts are often
announced too late
Does not
specify side-of-street for destinations
Route
corridor map set creation feature removed
Text-to-speech feature
removed
Doesn't
announce side-of-street for destinations
Interferes
with Windows Media Player while running
"Finger
Friendly" interface makes many functions difficult
to find
No softkey
support (WM Pro)
Can't use
standard Software Input Panels (WM Pro)
Can't use
keyboard to navigate in some areas (WM Pro)
Standard
version can't access POIs on map (WM Standard)
| Value |  |
| Ease of Use |
 |
| Features |  |
Overall |
|
Let's take another look at my 3 most
OVERALL IMPRESSION
important things that my mobile device needs to do
while in the car:
- Play music
- Tell me how to get to my destination
- Allow me to make and answer phone calls
CoPilot Live
annoyingly breaks my device's capability to play
music by interfering with Windows Media Player's
functionality. That's not good at all.
Regarding number 2, this also is not done very well
given the voice prompts' occasional lateness and
occasional inaccurate map data (in my area of New
York.) It does not tell you what side of the
street your destination is on either, which means
even when you're in the vicinity of your destination
you still have no idea where it is. Number 3 is
actually the only one that CoPilot does well. When
stopped, I can easily tap on a point of interest and
call them right away. The same is true with POI
alerts along your route. Very nice! I can also
easily press the green phone hardware key on my
device to open the phone dialer. Incoming calls work
just fine as well.
It's unfortunate that
the map data is so unreliable in my area. I hear
CoPilot Live uses NavTeq map data in Europe, which
will likely be much more accurate. So if you're in
Europe, CoPilot Live will probably be much more
attractive. In North America, I can't recomend
relying on CoPilot Live to get you from point A to
point B if you're planning on following it word for
word just by listening to the voice prompts. You
really need to be aware of your route for CoPilot to
work well. That said, if you ARE aware of your
route and where you want to go, CoPilot has a lot of
other excellent features to help you in your
travels. The "Live" tracking and communications
feature is very nice and unavailable in anything
else. The live traffic updates are also very much
worth the price of admission for CoPilot Live.
So in summary, if you
want to shut your brain off, listen to your MP3s and
follow the voice prompt instructions to get where
you're going, CoPilot Live is not for you. If
you want to let your spouse, children, friends or
coworkers stalk you as you drive… If you want
instant traffic updates without paying a
subscription fee… if you want to manage long
multi-stop trips on your desktop computer… if you
don't want to be locked to one storage card or one
Windows Mobile device… then CoPilot Live is the
only game in town.
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