CoPilot Live 8 review

Jim Martin

We review CoPilot Live 8, a cheaper SatNav alternative to TomTom or Navigon

Published on Sep 23, 2009

Costing a shade under £26, it's tempting to assume that CoPilot Live 8 is the obvious choice for full satellite navigation on the iPhone.

It's less than half the price of TomTom's app and has an impressive list of features. Everything is fully customisable, you get lane guidance for motorway exits, automatic switching between day and night mode, multi-stop trips, weather forecasts and more.

Live 8's driving view is also better looking than TomTom's, thanks to its familiar AA road atlas-style colour scheme. You can set PoIs to only appear when you're stopped, which de-clutters the screen considerably. Road names are large and easy to read, whether in portrait or landscape mode, and voice prompts are clear.

However, ALK needs to head back to the drawing board because there are several big problems that make Live 8 a useless co-pilot in your passenger seat. First is the app's awful reliability. Over a fortnight of testing, the app failed to load around 90 per cent of the time - a fundamental failing for any app. Of the times it did work, it would often quit unexpectedly, not just when receiving phone calls either.

Next on the list of woes is the poorly thought out registration process. This has to be completed before using the app for the first time. To compound matters, a bug means you have to register your email address and password via Wi-Fi, but unless you know this, you could end up stranded and not being able to use the app. Also annoying is CoPilot's inexplicable use of its own alphabetic keyboard, instead of using the iPhone's perfectly good Qwerty version.

Once you've overcome all this, a pop-up window with four buttons lets you enter a destination, choose from a list of recent places, change settings or select a different mode of transport. Again, entering an address is via CoPilot's own keyboard, but at least you can enter a full postcode, unlike Navigon's five-character limit.

It's good that you can minimise the information bar to see more of the map, and we appreciated the floating button for quickly accessing settings such as safety view, a turn-by-turn list and toggling between 2D and 3D maps.

A tantalising traffic information button is greyed out - ALK has promised this will be implemented in a future update. Similarly, the Roadside Assistance button simply displays the AA's phone number.

At this price, CoPilot could easily be better than both TomTom and Navigon, but while we know plenty of users haven't experienced the unreliability we have, we simply can't recommend Live 8 until this and other foibles are addressed.