Copilot Live on Android

I will be posting an initial impressions blog of my HTC Magic in a few days but this morning I was using the phone for sat nav and it was a major failure. On my normal route to work a road was closed where I was forced to go another way. Because I was not familiar with the area I fired up my Co Pilot Live 8 Sat Nav on the HTC Magic and this is where it began screwing up.

For some reason it insisted it needed setting up again with my local language, choice of voice navigation, imperial or metric measurements then to accept the disclaimer. The last time this happened I managed to select maps of Italy that required a complete reinstall. Considering I was using the sat nav at the weekend why did it do this?

Then the icing on the cake it already had my route in from the weekend (several stops) and insisted on routing me to these destinations. Trying to clear each one out (it has to be done indivdually) resulted in slow menus, bad response and general sluggishness as it was trying to calculate the route at the same time I was trying to clear it.

ALK need to put a cancel route button on the first menu page and get the above issue sorted to ensure the product is a success. Like always, when it works it is great but on this occasion it was a major fail.

The idea of using a combined phone and PND (personal navigation device) is appealing as there is only one piece of equipment. But when there are other factors of the phone such as bad software or rouge processes hogging it this can seriously affect the navigation part. It is at this point why I like stand alone PNDs preferably built into the car as they only do one thing but these do cost a lot.

So for the interim I will have to grin and bear the pain if it screws up again....