Great for navigation if you know where you are going (such as a contact, address, or a saved favorite)! Nice new routing controls compared to CoPilot 6 or 7, and easy to terminate or hide the program on my AT&T Fuze (HTC Raphael) running WM 6.5.

Current POI database is VERY patchy!!! In the US, NO NATIONAL STORE LOCATIONS such as Home Depot, Lowe’s, McDonalds, Burger King, Kentucy Fried Chicken, Staples, Home Depot, etc. As a stand-alone navigator without data access, the lack of a national POI database makes it less useable than a really cheap stand-alone GPS.

The newly released Live Search kind of compensates for the bad POI database, but it means you have to have a data connection to find and route to any of these national destinations. If that is a requirement (data connection), there are several alternative means to find a destination, Google Maps, Telenav GPS, GPS Today, Bing, etc. One very strong point of CoPilot 5-7 was that it was very useful without a data connection.

Hopefully an updated POI database will soon be available!

CoPilot support is VERY GOOD!!! You won’t be disappointed.

Be careful with their marketing, however, as it leaves something to be desired as a long-time user.

ALK seems to leave out desirable features from a previous release if they are having licensing/development issues. For example, Full Text to Speech disappeared from CoPilot 6 to CoPilot 7 and has yet to appear back in CoPilot 8! Live traffic disappeared in the upgrade from CoPilot 7 to CoPilot 8 (a $5 upgrade discount) and will reappear as a $20/year “add-on” with Live Services in CoPilot 8 (no discount for previous users)! Text to Speech will undoubtedly be another “add-on”.

I don’t have a problem with unbundling features to keep the price low, but it certainly would be nice to communicate up front with previous users what is going on in terms of pricing/feature sets/upgrades. Without good communication it feels like “bait and switch” marketing, and a $5 loyalty discount doesn’t cut it.

Finally, if you look at the website it appears that CoPilot 8 has a feature similar to “lane assist” where it will indicate which lane you should go to make a turn on a multi-lane highway. When I called support, they said that this feature is only available in the UK as the US database does not have this data…maybe they should talk to Garmin, Sony, Dash, etc.? Again, not a big deal if the ads/website has a disclaimer, but to find out after a purchase make a user feel taken.

That being said, my experience with CoPilot has been very good on the WM platform now for several years, starting with an HP IPAQ with external GPS to my current phone running WM 6.5 with an internal GPS.

I hope the iPhone/Android platform users will have similar good fortunes!!!

“CoPilot Live will now also automatically resume following a phone call.”

http://www.intomobile.com/2009/09/14/copilot-live-iphone-sat-nav-app-gets-a-free-update.html

The iPhone OS IS capable of multitasking, Apple simply has not allowed 3rd parties to do so, but the phone application is an Apple application that does effectively run in the background. When a call comes in – the phone switches the display to the phone, then switches back to the navigation application. This works very well for most of the navigation apps I’ve reviewed so far and the folk at ALK expect to improve CoPilot’s handling of these types of events in the near future.

So you do NOT need to ignore your phone call to use it. As a matter of fact, in most cases, once you answer the call, you can simply tap the home button, then re-tap your nav app icon to return to the nav app WHILE you stay in your phone call.

When you get a phone call and are driving to a critical location you’ll have to ignore your call to use it.

Navigation works great on a Palm Pre with multitasking, but if you own and iphone, spend $100 bucks and buy a dedicated GPS.