CoPilot Live 6 Motorola Q Edition Review
Last Updated (Monday, 21 August 2006 08:31) Written by Christopher Meinck Wednesday, 09 August 2006 06:41
CoPilot Live 6 for Motorola Q Review
CoPilot Live 6 from ALK Technologies is a complete GPS system and they offer a special Motorola Q edition. Read our comprehensive review.
CoPilot Live 6 for Motorola Q Review
CoPilot Live 6 from ALK Technologies is a complete GPS system and they offer a special Motorola Q edition.
What's In The Box
CoPilot Live comes with everything you need to turn your Moto Q into a GPS navigation system. The packaging was very professional and well done. Included in the Moto Q edition was the following:
- CoPilot Live 6 Smartphone Installation CD
- 1GB miniSD card with maps preloaded
- QuickStart card
- GPS Navigation QuickStart Guide
- Car Charger
- Bluetooth GPS
- Mounting Brackings
Installation
Installation of CoPilot Live 6 for the Moto Q was in a word, "easy". I have tried other solutions with the Treo including TomTom and Mapopolis and you cannot even compare the installation process with that of CoPilot Live 6. All of your maps come pre-installed on a mini-SD card along with the application. Once you insert the mini-SD card, CoPilot automatically installs. No need to connect your Moto Q to your Mac or PC. No ActiveSync. Simply insert the mini-SD card and off you go. Well, almost. You need to activate the license and this can be done right from your Q. Again, took a minute or so to complete this process. Having spent over an hour moving TomTom maps via a slow USB connection, I cannot say enough about how much I appreciated the easy installation process of CoPilot Live.
Navigation Using CoPilot Live
The CoPilot came with a Bluetooth GPS unit and a mount. It's small enough that it fit on my front dashboard, so I decided against the mount. The mount might be a good idea, allowing for quick charging using the included car charger. At any rate, I wanted to secure information from the satellite and felt the dashboard would provide a clear view of the sky. After launching the CoPilot Live application, I had to introduce the GPS unit. Within a few seconds CoPilot recognized BTGPS and provided supplementary data on the satellites. This information can also be found by selecting GPS within CoPilot Live.
When I first started testing CoPilot Live, I wanted to put it in "driving mode". No set destination, but show me where I am in the map. I wasn't able to get a this mode with CoPilot. CoPilot worked best you when you "Add a Stop"; another term for selecting your destination.
I used the Intersection option and chose a popular intersection for my first destination. As fate would have it, police were blocking the road CoPilot had originally set up for my itinerary. Being familiar with the area, my plan was to circle around to my destination. CoPilot noted the change the instant rerouted my itinerary on the fly and the route was exactly what I would have done.
Selecting intersections or major highways shouldn't be difficult for any GPS System. The real test is it's ability to guide me to specific addresses. CoPilot allows you to select an address from your contacts. This brings up a list of your contacts. Unlike the Contacts application, it doesn't support what I call "smart addressing", so typing the first few letters of a contact will not bring up the name of the contact. Instead, you have to scroll though the selections. Scrolling was fast and it was easy to select any of my contacts. I would like to see "smart adressing" in future versions of the application. I selected the address of my friend Michael and CoPilot returned a list of incorrect addresses. This was very odd and I checked the contact record and did not notice a data entry error on my part. He doesn't live on a main road, but I'm sure this street has been around for 30 years or so. I continued to select Contacts and CoPilot was correctly found the address of my next contact. After my trip, I tested a few other addresses within my Contacts and had better results. Knowing the address of my friend Michael, CoPilot was able to navigate to the address when I put it in manually using the "Address" feature.
Back to the road! There are a few modes that CoPilot offers while driving. Coming from TomTom 5, I prefer 3-D Map. This provides a view of your current location and a 3-D view of upcoming turns and streets. The interface is very clean. Your GPS location is noted in green and turns noted in bright yellow. There are options in CoPilot to set the Map colors to "Night Mode", "Day Mode" or "Automatic". There area number of options you can set for Guidance, Routing, Maps (as shown below) along with Language and Speech. I want to pay particular attention to turns that I needed to make. Lisa, who I chose as my voice, was very clear and gave me plenty of notice before turns. Coupled with the on-screen graphics, CoPilot was very responsive and the information was accurate from my car to the screen on Moto Q.
Points of Interest
Nothing helps feed my addiction for Starbuck's Coffee like a GPS system that can locate a Grande Traditional (that's Starbuckese for Medium Coffee). I remember my first trip out with the TomTom Navigator 5, where I was able to find a Starbuck's off Route 95 on a trip back from Canada. I quickly took an exit and the GPS took me 1.5 miles down to nirvana. CoPilot Live 6 also features Points of Interest or POI's. After CoPilot Live 6 successfully guided me to a main intersection in my town, I decided to try POI's. I set a stop for Home and enabled POI alerts on CoPilot Live. It brings up all types of POI's including hospitals, auto repair, gas stations, restaurants and more. To be honest, this feature is not usable without refinements. To test out the quality of the POI's, I set POI options to strictly Gas Stations. For those familiar with the New York area, I was travelling down Sunrise Highway. This is a major road and there are gas stations every 1/2 mile or so. CoPilot found some of gas stations, but missed a few. It seemed rather selective. I actually stopped for gas during this trip at a Getty station not found in CoPilot.
During another outing with CoPilot, I asked it to find a retail establishment knowing full well that a mall was within 1 mile of my location. CoPilot's results were lacking and returned zero results. I removed the limitations on POI options to see what POI's would CoPilot would recommend. The results were very odd. I was in a very commerce filled area and it would return Auto Repair - which actually was a car dealership. I pulled into a parking lot with an Auto Barn and it came up Swift Auto Parts. Most people will use this feature for restaurants and gas. Using my planned trip to my friend Michael's house, I asked CoPilot for POI's. Two of the three were enroute to the desitanation. Although I enjoy TGIF's, CoPilot also included this in the list and it was clearly out of the way by 10 minutes or so. It would have been nice to have a feature that shows the mileage to the POIs. When on the road, this would have an impact on your decision making.
Live Feature
One of the highlights of CoPilot 6 is the "Live" feature. By creating an acccount online, you can track progress to your destination. More importantly, you can share this information with friends and family. From a CoPilot website, they can view your current location and send messages to the driver. After creating a login username and password online, I entered the information into the Live settings on the Q. Despite having a locked GPS signal and setting the update feature to 1 minute, I was unable to locate my device on the website. Choosing the Invitations option didn't fare any better as it spent minutes trying to update. I suppose that spending some more time with this feature might get it functioning properly, but it's a feature I consider more of a "wow" feature than something I could find myself using regularly.
Conclusion
ALK Technologies CoPilot Live 6 offers you the ability to turn your Moto Q into a robust navigation system. Despite the Moto Q being on the market for less than a month, they have managed to release a Motorola Q specific edition. CoPilot Live 6 sets the standard when it comes to out of box experience, especially when compared to other PDA-based GPS systems such as TomTom 5. Getting up and running was a breeze and I had the system running in a matter of minutes without the use of my desktop computer. Despite an issue with one contact, overall CoPilot was able to retrieve my stops for my contacts within the preinstalled maps. Knowing the area, the trips I took using the guidance were on a match with how I would have navigated. Voice commands were loud, clear and integrated well with the on-screen 3-D maps. POI's results were less than optimal, but it will find you a gas station or restaurant when in need. If you plan on making use of the Live feature, this unit could disappoint.
Overall, I found CoPilot to be an easy-to-use GPS System that worked nicely within my Moto Q, but just don't ask it to get your coffee.
CoPilot Live 6 Q Phone Edition retails for $349.95.