Ditch the Map and Get yourself a CoPilot

Smartphones have already dealt with removing MP3 players and compact camera from our pockets, and next on the list is satellite navigation. There’s a huge selection of satnav apps available for most smartphones, ranging from the very cheap to the rather expensive. CoPilot Live Premium comes in at just £29.99, but packs a hefty punch in the features department.

CoPilot has just about everything you need from satnav, with the ability to give several options for planned routes, and to let the user plan there own by just dragging the route around a map; there’s also lane assist, which shows a very clear image of what lane of the motorway you should be in. ClearTurn also helps to make the most complex of junctions an absolute doddle to navigate. Another nifty feature is being able to tell you where you’ve parked your car – very useful when you’ve lost it in the supermarket car park. The app also uses text-to-speech technology to read out proper street names, rather than just giving the road number – very useful when you’re navigating through an unknown town.

But this is more than just satnav, CoPilot Live Premium is full of social networking features, too. The app will check you in on Facebook when you pass areas of interest, and update your Twitter feed with location updates, too. This might be taking Locational Social Networking (which I just made up now) a bit too far, but bear with me. Local areas of interest are flagged up while you drive, and Bing and Wikipedia can be accessed from within the CoPilot app. The real-time weather of your location and destination can also be displayed, which may not be the make-or-break feature, but it’s certainly a nice addition.

In testing I found CoPilot Live Premium very quick to correct itself when I deliberately went the wrong way. And as with most satnav apps the maps are stored on your iPhone; yes this takes up some space (about 300mb), but means you don’t need a data connection for the navigation to work.

Paired with ActiveTraffic (subscription, £9.99 per year), which can route you around any unexpected traffic, CoPilot really is the complete package, with good sound and very clear instructions.

Summary: an excellent, cheap and feature-packed satnav that offers everything a driver could need, and then some.

Pros: relatively cheap, social networking included, very sharp and clear visuals, text-to-speech works well

Cons: takes up lots of space – around 300mb for UK and Europe maps – as with all satnavs, ActiveTraffic is an additional subscription