CoPilot Live for BlackBerry
 

CoPilot Live Blackberry Edition: ALK Technologies

free for 6 months


Full featured GPS Navigation on your BlackBerry™

Latest street level maps of U.S. and Canada downloaded each trip

Turn-by-turn directions available in over 20 languages

6 million Points of Interest

Easy destination entry: address, zip code, home, work, POI, recent and favorite

Routing Options: Automobile, RV, Walking, Quickest, Shortest and Toll Road
avoidance

Enter up to 10 addresses in one trip

Automatically re-routes if you miss a turn

Provides continuously updated information including: ETA, speed, direction

Co-Pilot is a nice commercial GPS option... I beta tested it for a few months and liked it. I would rate it in the top two or three of commercial GPS apps for the BB.

Never tried this.

I am going to try it tomorrow around the Windy city.

I tried it, its ok but I prefer Mapquest Navigator

I tried it today on my coworkers 8310. Works pretty good! Actually shows full screen gps.

It's crapping out for me and many others. Lots of "No Reponse From Server" messages. I can't get it to do a freaking thing. I did call their tech support and they called back. The guy said all of their developers were at the WES but he would get back to me.

I havent had any errors like that, but it does seem a little slow to me. It seems to react slowly to turns, much slower than TeleNav. the interface is very "pretty" with blues and yellows, but seems abit too much for a commercial app if you ask me. (Very similar to what VZNav did). Overall not bad for 6mo free but still a bit behind TeleNav.

I will add to my review a bit later

I got the GPS set up easily enough. It took 12 hours to get it to even connect and find my home addy. It has yet to be able to connect and find my work addy. And POI's, nope. All I've gotten is "No Response From Server".

As far as driving directions, no dice there either. It would seem from a cursory look that they either overwhelmed with server traffic from all the BB users giving it a try, that their software wasn't quite ready for prime time, or the 6 months free is for me beta testing their software. Which, is not such a bad thing if they can get it to work.

I did not DRIVE TEST it but I did install it on my 8830 with puck and it found satellites and I got it to give me a route across town. That was around noon. I've not tried it since.

Edited to add: It did not choose a route I would generally take but it was certainly logical if you are unfamiliar with the area.

Update: tech support called twice today. This morning to let me know they were working to duplicate my issues and this afternoon to give me a fix. The fix worked. I had the Connection Setting set to Automatic Detection (I am on a BES). They had me change it to BIS, shut down the app, restart it and voila! It works like a champ. I thought I had tried changing that setting myself but I guess I must have missed it.

As an observation, they seem to have pretty good tech support that follows up until the problem is solved and relatively quickly.

Don't give up on it yet
 

I wouldn't give up on ALK yet. I used CoPilot Laptop 9 on my Laptop a couple years ago and it was very reliable and always got me where I was going (I was using it in an 18-wheeler in RV mode). It allowed me to avoid certain roads and carefully plan my route with all kinds of preferences. I had it set up to warn me when I was within 10 miles of a fuel stop or rest area.

Of course there may be some problems to start, but it is new for the Blackberry which is why they are giving us 6 months free. This is basically their way of saying "here. Try it out for 6 months. Yeah, you may have problems, but we will work them out over the next half year."

Once the kinks are gone, I think this will be a great program.

By the way, I can't download it yet as blackberry.alk.com doesn't respond. Anyone have the file they can send me?

As far as a GPS puck, if you don't have one and need one, I highly recommend the Freedom Keychain GPS 2000 - It works where other GPS receivers failed.

the windows mobile version of co-pilot i found to be rubbish, e.g. it would give you turn details far too late, wouldn't tell you to get into the right lane beforehand either - but that was the UK version. also found the suggested routes were much longer than they ought to be!

I have tried CoPilot for a few days now and found the routing to be just fine. I like that you can add multiple stops to your route - it helps a lot when you are going somewhere that doesn't have a data tower and you have to go somewhere else from there.

For the first day, I too was having the error communicating with their servers, but after that it worked quick and just fine.

It tells me of turns with PLENTY of warning and time (unlike the version I used for Windows mobile in the past with the T-Mobile Dash - I think that GPS puck I had just sucked).

Overall, here are some things I would like to see improved - otherwise, CoPilot Live 7 for the blackberry is a winner:

• Voices need to be louder (I drive a diesel)
• Voices need to talk faster
• Voices need text to speech
• Need 3d map view
• Need access to bigger POI database like Telenav and Mapquest Navigator have
• Need to be able to give a title to your Favorites (searching through your favorites and seeing only addresses is not very helpful)
• Traffic avoidance would be a plus

I am thinking that there will probably be a lot of updates since this Blackberry version is WAY behind what the same Windows Mobile version does. That is probably why they are giving a free trial. It is nice that the program will update itself as the updates are released.