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- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 7 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
3.5 stars
"Excellent maps and options for a Pocket PC GPS"
Pros: Much improved display and destination entry options, good Bluetooth receiver,
Cons: HArd to hear instructions out of Pocket PC speaker, erroneous directions not uncommon,may lockup on PDAs with complex features
Summary: CoPilot 5 is a much improved product with many user friendly features, excellent map displays, including 2-D and 3-D views, night display mode, and excellent options for entering destinations. POI list is good but many major lodging facilities and restaurants in some locales are strangely missing. New Bluetooth GPS receiver is much better than previous cradle and flash card units and pulls in signals quickly and well in most locations. I have yet to need my accessory external antenna. I routinely get close to 8 hours of use out of a single battery charge. An accessory cable enables the Bluetooth GPS unit to be charged off the regular PDA cable, so an accessory charger isn't necessary (contrary to what CNET says in the review). I keep the GPS receiver on a dashboard sticky pad and it stays put nicely. I have a ProClip cradle for the PDA. Except when charge is low and I need to supply poower to the GPS receiver, you have a cableless BT connection to the PDA that is convenient and reliable.
There are a few problems. Overall, directions are good and it will usually get you where you need to go, but like all portable GPS units, it does occasionally have trouble. The instructions are not always correct. Going from Durham NC to the RDU airport, it told me to turn west on I-40 when you need to go east (the text display said west, the voice said west, but the map showed east!). It also seem to have a problem finding the entrance to Nashville airport coming from the city. Instructions around complicated ramps are often impossible to intrepret. Try entering the approach ramps to the George Washington Bridge coming south on the Henry Hudson Parkway in NYC. It told me to take an exit that doesn't exist and did not display the correct ramp until I was already on it.
I have a complex PDA, the HP6315 ipAQ which is also a GMS telephone. CoPilot does not interact well all of the time with my other applications, such as GPRS Email and telephone and the PDA will occasionally lock up freezing the GPS. Not nice when you are driving on a busy freeway and coming up on your exit. However, the fault here probably isn't with CoPilot -- it's, of course, the flaky OS from you know who.
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