I'm a fan of CoPilot Live, but recently had an experience that soured my opinion of the company. I'm what some call a "power user", and as such I do a lot of stuff with my smartphones that "normal" people don't do. This time around, however, it was power-users like me that helped identify an underlying problem that "normal" people would likely run into — eventually.
Here's what happened. I flashed a new nightly build of CyanogenMod ROM and performed a full wipe (which I like to do every few months to keep things running fast and quickly get rid of apps that I don't use anymore). After I had reset my account information I started downloading my purchased apps from the Android Market. Everything went just fine — or so I thought.
Some apps require login credentials as an extra layer of copy-protection. CoPilot Live is one of them. I manually keyed in my username and password and got "Error 806", which basically means that I've installed CoPilot on "another" device. Since this was a fresh ROM, it looked like a new device. I tried to get support through ALK's forums. Others had reported the same problem, but few people were reporting success getting past the error. I turned to their Twitter account. After sending a few messages back and forth I was finally punted over to what was supposed to be a customer support request form, but resulted in a "404: Page Not Found" error. I hunted around on my own until I found what I thought was the right form, filled it out, and waited.
I finally got instructions back which essentially had me uninstall CoPilot Live, delete the folder from the sdcard, and reinstall the app from the Android Market. That got me past the error, but I had the privilege to download my maps again — all 1.3 GB of them. Over HSPA+. Luckily I'm one of the lingering few who still has unlimited data, and have a solid 3Mbps download speed over T-Mobile's HSPA+.
Unfortunately, the experience cost me 3 days without being able to use my GPS software, 3 hours of tying up my device while it downloaded the maps (again), and a HUGE chunk of data. That's not what I've come to expect from ALK.
Luckily, the "ROM Update Re-Installation Bug" should be fixed with the latest update (version 9.1.0.119) to CoPilot Live, which is available now in the Android Market and the CoPilot Store. Hopefully this fix means that others won't go through the same headaches that I had to.
Improvements
-
Support for additional text-to-speech (TTS) voice engines including Loquendo
-
Improved ability to transfer a CoPilot Live v8 traffic subscription to CoPilot Live Premium or Standard
-
Improved installation following ROM updates
-
Improvements to routing, in particular alternate route options
-
Adds a CoPilot ID password reminder feature
-
Better pairing with an external GPS receiver
-
Improvements to tunnel mode
Fixes
-
Resolves repetition of spoken next turn instructions
-
Resolves in-app purchase Google notifications issue
-
Fixes an issue where POI graphics were corrupted on certain devices
-
Various minor UI and localization improvements
CoPilot Live Premium USA for Android on AppBrain
Source: ALK