Navigation Archives - cars & life blog

Offline navigation app for iPhone is one of the necessary things when you use navigation all the time and suffer from the data surge. And I found one CoPilot Live. The Google Maps and Apple Maps offer navigation based on online maps, literally, you download the map whenever you use these apps. And this means, your data package shrinks!

The solution is to find an offline navigation app. There are many of them, however there is an issue. Many of the offline navigation apps are not designed to consume light space on iPhone’s memory. You install one navigation app and you download the map of UK, and it is 1 GB! A huge portion of your memory is done due to a map. And many people are not happy with this, especially if you are a heavy iPhone user.

Recently I found an app called CoPilot Live. It is a navigation app, like many others, but unlike others, the maps are really small size and nothing has been compromised for saving space. Also you are not left alone with the state-of-art Google Maps search ability. CoPilot Live offers the Google search integration. And the best part is, you can pick different types of transportation. Starting from walking, bicycle, motorcycle, van and car. Most of the navigation apps are designed only for car-based navigation and if you don’t own a car, they are quite useless. However, CoPilot live does not limit you with only car, also offer walking and other types of vehicles. The other advantage of this wide range of choice, some of the roads are not wide enough for van and in many countries bicycles has a designated lane. And also, you can switch to walking mode and start using the CoPilot Live while commuting in a train, so you can capture really high speeds :)

CoPilot Live also updates the locations of the speed cameras, and active traffic information. Nowadays, every city has a crowded traffic and many navigation apps are not quite useful when it comes to this. I have tried the CoPilot Live’s active traffic and the result was fantastic. Furthermore, you can easily add a GPS coordinate as a destination. This feature is not available in most of the navigation apps, and may be one day you may need to enter a GPS coordinate to find a destination.

And lastly, when you install CoPilot Live, you don’t have to use a printed map during your summer holiday. Because, it uses offline maps and you can find your way so easily and quickly. Of course, try to install the maps before departing to holiday country.

IOS 6 Update for your iPhone was one of the biggest shocked for many people. Especially, if you were using your iPhone’s Google Maps app to find your way. Google Maps was providing a proper navigation and saving our lives! And never ends in Canada when you search for London in UK! The satellite photos were not from the Second World War and not covered with clouds. Actually, there are lots things to criticise about the new Apple Map application came with IOS 6.

After the Apple Maps headed me to University College Birmingham instead of University of Birmingham, I started to look for a free navigation application on iTunes. There are many applications but they don’t offer walking service, there are some of them offer everything but want to vacuum your bank account. Thus, I decide to find something in the middle, cheap and useful.

And I didn’t give up and hopefully I found this, myGPS. It is only £0.69 ($0.99) at the moment. You can use Google search to find a place without dealing with postcode or street name. You can navigate for walk or drive. The map is based on OpenStreetMap and very reliable. The user interface is very easy to use and even with iPhone 4, myGPS works brilliantly. I couldn’t find anything to criticise, may be the lack of satellite images but that’s fine. You can still have the satellite images by using Google Maps from the Safari web browser.

I am really happy with the myGPS, I know it will never ever fill the place of Google Maps but that’s the best thing we can get at the moment. And walking navigation works really well!

Yes, I tried to walk to McLaren Head Office in Woking :)