The battle for satnav supremacy on your iPhone has been raging for months, with TomTom and CoPilot revving their engines and trying to catch your eye with their respective efforts. We’ve given TomTom’s effort a whirl, but is the CoPilot Live UK/Ireland iPhone app all it’s cracked up to be? Read our full CoPilot Live UK/Ireland iPhone app review now and we’ll give you our verdict.
At £26.99, the CoPilot Live UK/Ireland iPhone app is a whole £33 cheaper than the basic TomTom iPhone app. And we love a bargain, especially at a time when our wallets are getting a government assisted hammering by the man in Number 11. But while this iPhone add-on is cheap, it does have plenty to commend it.
You can manually move the map with multitouch, unlike the TomTom iPhone app, which gives CoPilot Live UK/Ireland iPhone app an edge for starters. Once you get it going, you’ll find the GPS locks on in record time. Take a wrong turn at a junction on the motorway and you’ll find it reroutes just as well as a dedicated PND or its Dutch app rival from TomTom.
Read our TomTom iPhone app review now
Yet while the CoPilot Live UK/Ireland iPhone app can happily chunter along in the country or even the biggest, scariest motorways, it just cannot deal with cities. We slapped it to the windscreen and took it for a ride in London, where it failed to give us accurate directions and couldn’t cope with the number of twists and turns in the road. In fact, it often gave directions after we’d already taken the correct turning, hardly helpful if you don’t know where you are. We’ve met kids with a better grasp of our capital’s geography.
The battery life is also nothing short of disgraceful. We managed to run it down from a full charge to completely empty in a mere hour. While satnavs are labour-intense apps, this is very poor form. However, if you grab an iPhone cradle from your local garage and make sure you have a charger, you’ll be just dandy.
While we love the CoPilot Live UK/Ireland iPhone app for its price, we just can’t recommend it if you plan on ever doing some urban driving. The TomTom iPhone app is a lot of cash, but Holland’s best remain number one in the satnav game.
