The race to dominate the turn-by-turn GPS app market is in full force at the App Store. Of course, the major players like TomTom and Navigon are all present and accounted for.  Happily though, we’re seeing a number of other companies offering substantial alternatives to the GPS fray.  One of them is ALK Technologies with their attractively priced CoPilot Live North America app.  But how does it hold up against the big boys? Let’s take a look.

When launching CoPilot for the first time, users will be prompted to set up a CoPilot Live account.  This will activate live weather updates and Live Friend Tracking, which allows for location sharing.  After an ID is established, CoPilot begins to determine your current location via satellite.  In our tests, we were impressed with the connection speed – usually under 30 seconds.  From the main map screen, users can begin to set up travels by tapping the Menu tab.

The main menu screen offers the following commands: Destination, My Places, Quick Stop (POI), Detour, and Live Services.  Setting your destination is a fairly straightforward process. A destination can be entered by manually typing in an address, choosing a POI, selecting a contact from your iPhone address book, picking a location on the map, typing in an intersection, or entering coordinates.  CoPilot offers a huge array of data entry options.  When selecting from contacts, CoPilot still walks you through the State, City, Street inputs if your contact’s info isn’t in the proper format. Thankfully, the software offers best guesses for each input based on its database.  My Places are locations that you go to frequently.  Recently visited spots can be recalled along with the option to manually enter your Home, Work, or Favorite locations.

POI searching is accessible under the Destinations button in the main menu.  From our experience, CoPilot offers a generous POI database and they a quite up to date.  We found nearby restaurants that were built within the last year.  Users can search for a nearby POI by category or name.  Searching in the Restaurant category will take you to a sub category for food style such as Bistro or Chinese. Once a POI is chosen, CoPilot displays the address and gives the choice to call or go there.

On the main menu’s second page are the Trip editing, Driving Views, Save Current Location, Delete Next Stop, and Settings sub pages.  Within the Settings page it’s possible to change your routing style (automobile, walking, bicycle, RV), choose between eight different map styles, set sound preferences, determine a language for voice guidance, and a slew of other options.  You can even replay past travels with a real-time play back mode.  Really, the amount of options packed into CoPilot Live North America is astounding.

Real world use of CoPilot is equally impressive.  Once a destination is entered, CoPilot will begin to calculate the route.  The time to calculate depends on the distance between the current and final destination.  We found trips around 40 miles took under 15 seconds to calculate.  While traveling, the screen is fairly clean and uncluttered.  The footer can be customized to show the destination address, current road, ETA and time remaining, ETA and distance, nearest town, or speed and distance.  Unfortunately, for some reason, CoPilot always uses military time.  For most users in North America, 12 HR time format is much preferred if not essential. Resting atop the footer is the name of the next upcoming guidance step, be it a road or an exit. To the left of the map screen, a directional arrow shows the next turn direction along with distance to that step.  Above the next move arrow is a button to access the main menu.  Battery state, route style, and GPS status are shown in the lower right corner.  When approaching an exit, CoPilot gives a green exit sign at the top of the screen showing the exit number and name.  We experienced a few quirks in our testing.  For one thing, when we launched CoPilot it would periodically dim the screen and then turn off.  Only upon turning on the iPhone and unlocking the screen would CoPilot remain onscreen.  We also had some problems with Safety Mode, which displays a large yellow arrow on a black backdrop, randomly activating and remaining active until manually switching back to 2D or 3D map mode.  These two issues were a bit annoying as we feel you shouldn’t ever need to touch the GPS device once routing is started.

In the audio department, CoPilot offers text-to-speech abilities that speak directions but not street names.  There are three voices to choose from, two male and one female in the English language.  All are clear and understandable if not a bit robotic sounding. Other languages include French, German, Italian, Spanish, among many others.  When approaching the next guidance step, the voice prompt will announce things like “In 500 feet, turn right”, or “Now, turn left”.  iPod controls are sadly lacking in CoPilot although you can play your iPod library in the background it you wish.  iPod controls are stated to be in an upcoming update by ALK.

After spending a considerable amount of time with CoPilot Live North America, we can comfortably recommend it to those looking for a feature rich iPhone GPS solution at a median price range.  As of this review, CoPilot Live North America is selling for $34.99 on the App Store.  This is less than half the price of its big name competitors.  For the price, buyers will get a nice turn-by-turn GPS app in a handsome 1.2 GB package, putting all maps on the device regardless of cell phone reception.  Despite a few hiccups, ALK has positioned CoPilot Live North America as an attractive competitor that delivers a great user experience.

CoPilot Live North America gets our AppSmile 4-Dimple rating: