NaviGadget

CoPilot Live Laptop 9 review

Mar 25, 2006 gps navigation, reviews, software

At $299 (list), ALK’s CoPilot Live Laptop 9 is the most expensive of the laptop-based GPS packages PC Magazine has reviewed. Like Microsoft’s Streets & Trips and Delorme’s Street Atlas USA 2006, CoPilot Laptop 9 comes with a USB 2.0 receiver. The receiver is based on the new SiRF Star III GPS chipset, whose technology won a PC Magazine Technical Excellence award in 2005. A version of the product with a Bluetooth GPS receiver ($299 list) is also available, as is a software-only version ($199 list).

Unlike the Delorme and Microsoft products, Laptop 9 requires product activation; you can use it without activation for just three days. You can install it both on the laptop that you’ll be using for navigation and on a second system for trip planning. ALK provides a means of deactivating the license so that you can move the software to another system.

The “live” component of Laptop 9 clearly differentiates it from the competition. If your notebook has a live Internet connection while you’re navigating, you can let your friends track your progress. You create an account on live.alk.com, enable the live connection on your notebook, and send your friends an e-mail invitation. ALK generates a link to a Web site that will show your current position. Through this interface, they can also communicate with you as you drive by asking a question and providing a choice of up to four possible answers. We recently tracked a coworker on his cross-country trek using the live feature. It worked well as long as the notebook had an Internet connection.

CoPilot Live includes a number of options for voice-prompted directions. You can choose from ten language options (U.S., U.K., or Australian English and German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, or Danish). For English-language selections, you can also choose between prerecorded speech files or text-to-speech conversion. Text-to-speech will provide more extensive directions and will pronounce the street names for upcoming turns. Non-English selections provide only prerecorded speech files. A new feature in Laptop 9 allows you to replace the prerecorded voice files with your own files or to download new voice sets as they become available.

CoPilot Live has two operating modes: planning and navigating. You don’t need to have a GPS receiver attached to use the planning mode. Each mode includes an icon for switching to the other mode. The planning mode lets you create, edit, save, and print your trips. With the TravPak printing option, you can choose to print a cover page with trip summary information, a trip overview map, maps of starting and intermediate destination points, detailed turn-by-turn directions, and so forth…. full review