By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on March 14, 2010 at 11:55 am
Belt and braces seems the best solution. We will try our brand new version of CoPilot Live but take our Garmin and print the route from Google maps as a last resort. Then shout at each other like in the good old days.
Trying to find a tiny hamlet in a foreign country can be fraught; even if it is located only a hundred miles away and most of that journey is on a ferry. We think we can see where we are heading from Google Maps’ satellite view but none of our sat-nav devices admit it exists. Not even our new CoPilot Live Europe version.
Of course, our destination is marked on Michelin maps; printed in easy-to-use, 6 point, sans serif condensed, light grey ink. Even the super smooth French roads make this impossible to read, as the car jiggles along.
CoPilot EU
After much umming and ahhing we decided to get the Europe version of CoPilot for iPhones. It is £50 but the UK and Ireland version has taken over from our dedicated Garmin device. It is easier to use and carry CoPilot inside an iPhone than it is a bulky stand-alone sat-nav and it will be useful to locate hypermarkets and car parks as well as when we are walking or using public transport.
The download is big. At nearly 2GB CoPilot Europe is 10 times the size of the UK and Ireland version, 8GB iPhone owners will need to take note. It also took a long time to arrive. This is something of a weakness in the iTunes store because it is impossible to get these large files from any other source.
Once downloaded and installed; again another 30 minutes or so to copy to the iPhone; the program looks exactly the same as CoPilot UK and Ireland. It was a bit fiddly to register with ALK for some reason and this has to be done over a wireless network. CoPilot Centre isn’t implemented on the iPhone which means there is no way to type in the registration number.
GPS abroad
There is one worrying instruction on ALK’s CoPilot support site. The FAQ has a question: “I cannot get a GPS fix whilst in another country.”
The answer is: “This is because you have disabled data roaming on your iPhone. You need roaming enabled to get a GPS fix on the iPhone. Please check in SETTINGS that LOCATION SERVICES is set to ON.”
There is no way we are going to leave the UK with data roaming turned on, the cost per megabyte is prohibitively expensive. We are waiting to see whether this means CoPilot will stop working if it is out of range of cellphone networks. Just to be on the safe side, our Garmin will be charged up and ready for action until we find out.
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