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Copilot Live and Safety Cameras

MF1

Well-Known Member
Oct 27, 2009
115
1
Hi All

I have my new Hero and it works a dream, I have it organising my whole life.

One thing i would like to add is a decent SatNav. At present Copilot seems to be the only real contender that I am aware of. One of the main features I am interested in is the safety cameras alerts. Can anyone let me know how they find this please.

Does it include mobile safety camera locations?

Does it update every week or two or do I need to manually download new safety camera information?

Can I have this turned on even when its not navigating so it will just warn me if one is coming up?

Is there an extra subscription for this feature and/or traffic alerts?

Lastly how good is the actual satnav with copilot, are there any other serious contenders in this market I am am unaware of?

Orange maps looks pretty good but not avialable for the Hero!!!

Cheers everyone, look forward to your reviews :)

Mike
 
Telenav is pretty good from what I've used with it on the Sprint HTC Hero but I'm not sure if its offered globally. We'll be posting a review of CoPilot Live 8 in the next week or so... keep your eyes peeled on Phandroid for that.

I'm not sure either have the "safety cam" warnings you're talking about although I can see how that would be awesome. Telenav doesn't, CoPilot I'll have to check.
 
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I've got Co-Pilot, works nice, I did have Garmin Mobile on my Nokia N95 but I prefer CoPilot, the interface is slick, the map view is awesome as for speed cameras the option is dim on mine so I can't select it, not sure if that's because I need to load the information onto the phone or it's not supported at the moment, there is a subscription service that offers live traffic info so not sure if that will provide speed camera info at some point.

My only major complaint at the moment with it is that it doesn't use the android keyboard, instead using one created by CoPilot which isn't so hot.
 
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Copilot is completely isolated from android, you can't even navigate to addresses in your contacts book, or cut and paste anything (e.g. map co-ordinates) from any other app. It's also rather buggy, I have to reset it most journeys using taskiller. Controls are unresponsive and the journey time estimates are way off, which is annoying because if it's estimating journey times so poorly it's also picking non-optimal routes, as I can see when I plan routes between two places I know. Fiddling with routing parameters can correct it to a degree, but it ain't no tomtom which was quite amazingly good at getting routing times right.

Never used the tax camera option, and I'm surprised that we're three posts into this thread and some chump hasn't trotted out "you could always try not speeding" which is the usual 1st or 2nd reply...
 
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I'm using CoPilot 8. I'm mostly happy with it but do also suffer from either application hangs or loss of GPS signal from time to time.

ALK have been less then responsive to reported bugs, version 8.0.0.444 of CP8 broke the ability to import custom POIs, so if you are using 3rd-party speed camera data, you can't import them at the moment. I (and many others) have reported the problem but have yet to get a resolution to the problem.

I have no idea if this affects the CP8 native speed camera data however (as I removed it when I originally loaded another database).
 
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I believe it will cache the route when you plan it. However this means that if you want to detour en-route or even start an entirely new journey while out of reception you might be out of luck, depending on how much surrounding stuff gets cached, or whether you can specify areas to cache ahead of time.

And you never know with google whether theyre going to continue long term development to fix problems like these (if they occur) or whether it's just something theyre doing on a whim and theyre going to release a couple of versions then just abandon it in a semi-functional state.

But hey, it's only a beta so you dont really have anything to complain about, right? ;)
 
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Humm, interesting with the new proposed Google Maps and turn by turn navigation. But seems a way off yet and you will have to have an Android 2 Phone.

Still not sure whether to plump for CP8 or hang around and see if Orange release Orange Maps for the Hero and try that first.

Would be great it Tom Tom released an app for Android as they have with the iPhone. I have had a dig around on the net and cannot find anything though to suggest this imminent.
 
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Google Maps turn-by-turn looks interesting but I suspect it will need an internet connection full-time even for recalculating a route if you go off-route, strange considering it's released first in the U.S. where I'm told mobile internet coverage is very bad outside of cities. When driving in the UK it's often quite easy to get an internet connection, if not a continuous one so it could be quite good but I wouldn't use it exclusively.

This is actually one of the reasons why I'd still recommend copilot despite my reservations about it; it's cheap, it doesn't take up much space, and it doesn't need an internet connection so despite its laggy map scrolling, difficulty of picking locations on the map, inability to keep a GPS fix (strange that other apps are fine!) when travelling at speed, isolation from android, crashes, unresponsive controls and so on, it's still a cheap, useable GPS that will tide you over until you can get google maps TBT working and find out if it's any good. Or tomtom release their app, which I still rate as the best sat nav software around for road use.

Also copilot is loads better than Nokia's woeful Nokia Maps, that was truly dreadful, although I've not seen version 3 of it.
 
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I have noticed my hero gets pretty damned hot when running copilot - i expect it's running the cpu flat out pretty much constantly, for an extended period, also i've got the battery charging the whole time. So maybe its a heat related hardware issue (maybe mcguider doesnt stress the hardware as much and generate as much heat).
Yea could be that. The phone doesnt seem to get anywhere near as hot as it did when i used co-pilot.
 
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Try clicking on updates in the menu system - I have had safety camera warnings for the last month? - if that doesn't work try checking with 'Market' to see if you have an App update for CoPilot 8..

It just says it's up to date. I redownloaded it yesterday after a hard reset so it's up to date. Safety cameras is greyed out. Anything I need to do or download manually to enable it?

Edit: Think I have sussed it. In true ALK half baked fashion it seems you have to download the update manually and copy it into the CoPilot/save/ directory on the storage card. The instructions are for WinMo but seem to work for Android as well.

http://www.alk.eu.com/copilot/cameras.asp

Shame they can't include it as part of the updates...
 
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It just says it's up to date. I redownloaded it yesterday after a hard reset so it's up to date. Safety cameras is greyed out. Anything I need to do or download manually to enable it?

Edit: Think I have sussed it. In true ALK half baked fashion it seems you have to download the update manually and copy it into the CoPilot/save/ directory on the storage card. The instructions are for WinMo but seem to work for Android as well.

CoPilot Live Safety Camera Download: ALK Technologies

Shame they can't include it as part of the updates...

That worked a treat, great stuff. I now have the speed camera setting activated in CoPilot8............Thanks.
I think you should open a new thread 'activating copilot speed camera option' as i found your advise by chance, and I believe a few people who have copilot8 dont realise they have the free option to get this up and running.

Also does anyone know how to get extra voices, when I go to the CoPilot store in CoPilot Central and click on voices it says 'No product of that type on record'

Thanks Again.
 
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Hi,

Orange Maps is available for HTC Hero as well, I installed it a few weeks back..It seems to be ok so far, not as good as TomTom was on my HTC Touch HD earlier..(It does have Voice Navigation ..but the routes are not that good..probably the underlying algorithm for calculating the fastest route needs to be looked into by Orange)

Am planning to go for Copilot 8 as apparently it has live traffic info (not sure if its there for UK or not..) and at approx
 
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have a read of users comments on THIS forum. You will see that there has been a lot of complaints about Copilot
Setting daft routes
Poor customer support
Not supporting 3rd party cameras very well

The camera databases of most sat navs are very poor and out of date. I always use the one from PGPSW, at is by far the most accurate (for UK at least).

Because of these problems I chose Sygic's Mobile Maps 9, which I have been very pleased with - good routing, good customer support and easy to put PGPSW cameras and spoken alerts onto it. More expensive than Copolit (but not much more if you want all of Europe) and you can't get it from the market. Either Teleatlas or Sygic sell it.
 
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