I purchased CoPilot live about a fortnight ago one Friday afternoon, thinking I could test it out on my drive from london to manchester later that day. It took about 2 hours to download which put me quite close to 6PM when I left work so I was surprised when I excitedly started it up and it told me I now had to choose a map to download. What!?
The UK and Ireland map was something like 130MB. So I just did the drive without it.
Since then I still haven’t managed to get a single map downloaded. I’ve had dozens of attempts to download “UK and Ireland” over wifi onto my Samsung Galaxy, I’ve even tried starting with just the smaller maps like “Southwest England” but to absolutely no avail. Every single time it fails. The only other method of getting the maps is via a desktop application that only runs on Windows (I have a mac) so the application is completely useless.
I’ve already got a Tom Tom Go 720 which is brilliant but I wanted to give Co-Pilot a punt reasoning that it was only about twenty quid, included live traffic updates that my Tom Tom needs hooking up to a phone for and would cut down on the number of devices I had to carry around. So far its been nothing but a huge drain on the battery and a waste of a few hours trying to get it to work.
This was also a nice discovery: The only parts of CoPilot Live that are actually available in the UK at the moment are “Live Link” which shows you the location of all your other friends that use the software (ie no-body) and “Live Weather” which shows you the current weather… guess what, I’m driving my car so I’m already pretty much aware of what the weather’s doing. I’m British, that’s all we ever talk about, are the wipers on? Then it’s raining.
There was no mention at all of “Live Traffic” being unavailable, and if I’m honest that was the main selling point for me. Marketplace had no mention of it and the reviews (probably fake I’m now thinking) were excellent.
I guess that this is an example of why Apple so tightly control apps in the app store. Despite the laborious and restrictive approvals process the apps in the app store do at least work.
I picked up CoPilot on my iPhone and it works a treat!
No live traffic updates, but it’s definitely a bargain for the price.
Get a proper phone!
Haha!
I would swap the galaxy actually but I still prefer Android to iPhone OS.
Last week(?!) I got an email from Co-Pilot (four months later!!!) sending me a link to the maps and a load of fiddly instructions about dropping the maps in the right directory on the phone from a PC and blah blah
Followed them to the letter and now I have a licencing problem that they are “looking into”.
I’ve tried to sort this out by borrowing a PC an using the desktop client but on all three of the laptops I’ve used it gives me a .net error.
Still. Completely. Useless.