Sumary – CoPilot looks lovely, but sucks. Navigon rocks, but is a double-bagger. Can’t afford TomTom, but if they’d like to give me an evaluation copy, I’ll certainly give it a whirl & I imagine it’s probably the best.
CoPilot seems a bit of a steal at £19.99, then £19.99 for 1-year of traffic updates & fuel prices. And it initially looks fantastic, with a massive clear display & groovy colour-scheme. It’s possibly too customisable, you could spend ages tweaking settings but by default the routing seems OK, although it massively over-estimates ETAs. If you drive, ahem, exactly at the speed limit all the time. But you can specify in the routing profile exactly what speed you drive on each type of road.
The one thing I really don’t like is the red triangle representing your position turns into a big red circle (puck?) at low speed, obscuring detail on the map. Usually you’re at light or a junction, and working out which turn to take is made unecessarily more complicated.
However after a fair bit of use, the maps are old (see below picture of the A1 roundabout at Colsterworth) & CoPilot have said on their Facebook support site that their licence doesn’t allow them to issue map updates(!). So maybe CoPilot 2011 will be out, for another £20? It also seems a bit daft to charge £2.99 for a TTS voice. But their traffic implementation, well isn’t really implemented at all as it’s barely there.
It will connect over GPRS & get a list of traffic incidents, then show a traffic bar on the right-hand side of the screen & announce “Traffic Incident on Route”. Every time it checks (I’ve set it to 5min). You can go into the traffic incidents & select to avoid, but there’s no option to automatically re-route due to traffic. It’s a bit difficult to fiddle around while you’re driving, so you probably won’t bother. I’ve been trying to get some more details screenshots, but no matter where I select as a destination in the country (Glasgow, Croydon, Bristol etc..) there’s no incidents on my route….
I had to raise a case with support, as if you have the iPhone mounted horizontally & choose the playlists button in the iPod control the app crashes. It took 12 days for a response, although they did say they’d identified the problem & had got a partial fix & it would be included with the next update. Maybe they’ll include better traffic handling? And put an option in to get rid of the puck!
The USA CoPilot map is only £2.99, and if you vacation there it’s certainly worth purchasing.
Navigon was half-price a couple of weekends ago, and has now settled at £19.99 for the UK (British Isles). Lifetime traffic is £14.99. For some reason full-postcode input is £1.19, although it does work fairly well without it if you know the road/town you’re heading to.
The main interface wastes a lot of screen real-estate, with a big black bar at the top & bottom. The application has far fewer options than CoPilot & lot less choice of routing profile (Car, Motorbike, Lorry, Bicycle, Pedestrian & options to avoid motorways, tolls & ferries – perfectly sufficient). Maps seem to be upto date, and it includes a lot of POIs. The two buildings for my company are both represented on the map with the building name! You can in-app purchase 3D Maps (£6.99, so I’ve not bothered).
Selecting a destination (POI, from contacts or by entering an address/postcode, Google Search) is easy enough & you can then favourite it, see the nearest parking/petrol station (no prices)/McD’s. The route overview shows you a couple of routing options, but unless the journey is really short you won’t be able to tell the difference, and any traffic incidents on the route.
Under the options, Traffic->Consider Traffic Information can be set to Off/Automatically/On Request. You can see Route-Related incidents, or all by Distance/Road/Delay. Selecting an incident brings up a clear map with the details of the problem. A traffic icon hovers over the top-left of the navigation screen. Navigon uses (with permission) the location of other users to calculate traffic delays, routes & ETAs. So the more people driving nearby, the better the traffic info should be. But I don’t think they’ve reached the installed base of TomTom, who also aggregate general location data from Vodafone users.
The voice (TTS) is a bit basic, and if by mistake you exceed the speed-limit says “Beware” in husky tones. When near a speed-camera, says “Beware traffic control” (eh?!). A nice touch is she is polite & says “Please follow the road of 10 miles”.
Tomtom - supposedly has the best traffic info, TrafficHD which uses the data from many different sources to calculate delays. But I’m not going to pay £49.99 for the UK maps (or £52.99 for Europe), then £22.99 for a year’s traffic (1-month for £4.99 or 1-day for £1.19) to find out. Donations gratefully received!
Hopefully they’ll put that in their FAQ.
