[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III General] jskoller:
Initial Impressions of CoPilot 7

I know there have been many discussions regarding GPS SW here & elsewhere. I have been looking for GPS mapping SW that; 1- is resident on the Tilt, 2 - capable of obtaining maps for all of NA, Europe & Austraila, 3 - does not require a live Internet connection, but will use it if available to provide U.S. city traffic & other services and 4 does not require a monthly subscription fee.

Based on various discussions, I had pre-ordered the new version of CoPilot 7 under the 30 day return policy. They were very good during the order process, answering my questions promptly. The SW arrived on Friday 11/9. I installed it & spent the last 2 days out using it around Colorado. Here are my initial impressions...

Installation:

Copied the files from their uSD card to my 6GB uSD. Plugged the card in & the install went without problem. It found the Tilt GPS without any configuration. (I'm also running / testing VisualGPS, GPSGate, Google Maps on this Tilt) I also installed the PC version of CoPilot for planning. This also went in w/o problem.

Operation:

As a relatively knowledgeable user, I always attempt to use the product w/o reading any manual. This tells me how intuitive the operation is & I use that as a measurement on how well it was designed. On this count, I was less than impressed. The UI at first touch was not intutitve. This changed a little over time & by following the tips at startup. I like the voice directions, but miss the voice not naming the up-coming street name for the turn.

One major thing I noticed is that the lookup of POIs is very slow & sometimes didn't find things like major airports (Denver's DIA) or attractions (Mount Evans & Pikes Peak) properly.

Operation of the PC-based planning SW was also not intuitive. I finally figured it out, but it could use work. Double clicks were used when a single click selection was more intutitive.

On the plus side, after I got a couple of trips planned, they executed almost flawlessly. When I deviated from the planned route, the SW re-routed quickly and gave relatively good voice directions for the change.

Maps:

They seem like they may be a little out of date. They placed the GPS location of my house in the correct place physically, but in the wrong city by name. Some of the routing provided by the system attempts to take me through a street in my area that is permenently closed & has been for 2 years. When attempting to load a destination address, and the street in not in the map DB, it will not allow loading of the destination. This was a street in IL that has been there for at least 2 years.

Considering the competition:

I'm not into TeleNav as I don't want to pay by the month and I need maps outside the US w/o a large data bill. I don't feel like I want to be nickled & dimed on the cost of maps like some of the other products. I do want to be able to receive traffic updates for the U.S. The maps & SW must be able to be put on my card now & in the future as they get larger and not locked to the Vendors uSD card (Garmin).

Concludions:

Will I keep CoPilot? I'm not sure yet. Compared to what's out there, I might be able to get used to the UI. I wish they provided a way to give feedback on the map errors & allow more rapid fixes to be downloaded.

Sorry for the long-winded post. I'm going to keep using this for a while & I expect that as I become more familiar with the UI, the experiance should get better.

A quick additional note... CoPilot does have an on-line feedback mechinism for errors in maps. I will be driving my area to document the changes. Still not sure how long it will take to get the updates into the maps.

Thanks & please anyone else out there with any experiances? I'm looking to compare notes before my 30 days is up.