Review: CoPilot Live Australasia

New kid on the block

Yesterday’s launch of CoPilot Australasia was a surprise indeed, but a welcome one. New Zealand typically gets overlooked in so many ways so it’s great to say that we’re now officially spoiled for choice when it come to GPS navigation apps for our iPhones. CoPilot arrives third to TomTom and Sygic Mobile Maps, but does it have what it takes to take the crown?

Upon firing up CoPilot for the first time, the initial impression is that this is a highly polished affair – not as ‘basic’ looking as TomTom and more ‘iPhone-y’ than Sygic, but only just. The inital setup goes through the usual options – pick your units of measurement, pick your voice for verbal instructions and so on. It also allows you to setup ‘my places’ which include your home, work and favourites. Setting these makes life much easier in the future.

Welcome to CoPilot

The main menu includes the usual suspects such as ‘Destination’ and ‘My Places’ but also includes a couple of neat touches such as ‘Quick Stop’ which will let you quickly and easily find the things you’re most likely need to find in a hurry when in unfamiliar territory – petrol, hotels, restaurants etc – without trawling through the usual POI process of selecting city and category and then subcategory, and ‘Live Services’ which is sorely missing from both TomTom and Sygic. Live Services gives you the weather at your destination, the location of friends that you have added (as long as they are also currently running CoPilot of course) and Live Traffic, although this was greyed-out for me so I’m not sure if it’s unavailable in NZ or just my part of the country.

Main Menu

In terms of UI, the 3D animation is buttery smooth and far outshines either of the competition in this field, however there’s a lot going on on-screen which can make it a little fiddley for the driver. For example, on both TomTom and Sygic tapping the screen anywhere whilst driving will bring up the navigation menu, however on CoPilot one must press a single red icon in the lower left of the screen that is no bigger than an icon on the iPhone home screen. There are other elements such as windows-style ‘X’ to close buttons on pop-ups and some teeny-tiny status indicators on the lower-right of the screen that are impractical for a GPS device but in other places such as the main menu and settings menus the buttons are big and chunky and very easy to deal with.

Main map

The POI is extensive and very easy to search – much easier than either of the competition. You can begin typing in your search term without narrowing down to the relevant category, and the search is dynamic and narrows down with each letter pressed. For example, if searching for Farmers, you only need get as far as ‘Far’ before the results are populating your screen. When more than one branch of Farmers populates the screen you can press each one to bring up a 2D map of the location, the address and the phone number (with the ability to call it, too).

POI, POI, POI

Whilst navigating, the HUD is very nice with great animation (as mentioned before) and a range of options for colour schemes available. As well as being able to pick between 2D or 3D map views, you can also choose ‘driver safety’ mode which displays no map at all, instead simply displaying an arrow indicating the direction of the next turn on a black background as well as some other rudimentary information such as the name of the next road and the distance until you reach it. Tapping the blue bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to customise the information displayed there – by default it will show the name of the current street but you can choose between a number of other options including current speed, ETA, etc etc.

Customise your info bar

On the whole I found CoPilot to be as accurate as both TomTom and Sygic, but unfortunately I did run in to a couple of issues whilst testing the app yesterday. At one point I was travelling north along Cranford Street, but the app obviously didn’t have a good lock and kept thinking I was on Roosevelt Avenue which runs parallel with it for a few blocks. The display kept flicking between showing us on each road and the instructions it ended up giving were naturally very confusing and inaccurate. I also had an issue where the app told me to take the first exit on a roundabout I was approaching, which I did, but the display still showed me sat at the roundabout a few hundred metres later and then repeated the roundabout instruction causing me to wonder what was going on and having to look at the map whilst driving. I’m going to put this down to an unfortunately-timed poor GPS lock as I am not hearing huge amounts of complaints about the accuracy of this app around the net.

Where for art thou

There is a bit of annoyance for me. Having not seen the App being used before going by the screen shot below I thought this would be a view type, i.e 2D, 3D etc but no. This is used to tell you which lane to get into when coming up to a turn (ClearTurn). No problem with that but it doesn’t work here in NZ (well Christchurch at least). Some other things I found not to work were speed limits, speed limit warnings and speed camera warnings. Bit of a shame really as these are important factors.

ClearTurn M.I.A

The verbal instructions are clear and professional with several choices in terms of accents and gender, however there is no text-to-speech (i.e. street names are not announced) and there is no dimming or pausing of music if you have any playing in the background. ALK promise that the next update to CoPilot will enable more control over music inside the app.

Choose your voice

The app crams in a lot of ‘other’ features, one I really like is return to origin whereby when you arrive at your destination you can choose to set the app to direct you back to where you came from. It also includes weather where you can see your local weather or weather in your destination, mode of travel where you can choose the type of vehicle or walking and plenty more.

D.B go home

So we now have three solid and professional GPS solutions to pick from in the App Store and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to call a ‘winner’. Each has its own benefits and disadvantages so it really is a case of personal preference. CoPilot is arguably the slickest of the three apps with the smoothest animation and the best POI implementation. Price-wise it sits between Sygic and TomTom – marginally more expensive than Sygic, but quite a bit cheaper than TomTom and is inclusive of Australia to boot. TomTom is starting to look like the third place overall, but I can’t call it between Sygic and CoPilot.

– CoPilot Live