Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)For navigation duties in our 40' motorhome, I prefer a laptop-based GPS product - I like the large screen, large keyboard, more flexibility, and the less cost (for the application) than a dedicated device. For three years we exclusively used ALK's CoPilot which had a wonderfully intuitive and simple user interface. I went through three versions of CoPilot and was excited when CoPilot 11 was released. Excitement quickly turned to dismay when I realized ALK removed valuable features *and* it would faithfully crash every hour or two. Insult to injury when it was clear ALK apparently had no plans to release any patches for the product.
So this is the backdrop for me looking for alternative nav applications. Microsoft Streets and Trips is great for planning, but totally lame for real-time navigation. Delorme is pretty good, but hopelessly complex and the interface looks like options were scattered here and there as the application evolved. It seems to me like Delorme threw in everything anybody could possible want so it could be all things to all people.
After some hunting around on the Internet, I found iGuidance and read a hands-on review of it. It looked good enough to try out, but it has turned into quite a disappointment. For one thing, it will crash every hour or so on my laptop that faithfully runs Delorme. Route planning on iGuidance is not very flexible - it has no provision to avoid certain roads and the best you can do is to insert 'vias' like Delorme. I almost exclusively use Lat/Long for destinations since address or POIs are sometimes terribly inaccurate - unfortunately there is no way (that I found) to directly add a Lat/Long for a stop or end point.
iGuidance to me appears probably like an alpha release of the first version of CoPilot - lots of good ideas, a clean and simple user interface, but the product is not developed to the point to where it is worth $90. Not ready for the big-time at this point.
Click Here to see more reviews about: MAP-INAV-2009(PC): iGuidance 2009 North America Laptop, UMPC, Car PC Edition (DVD)
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