iPhone Sat Nav Roundup

ALK Technologies has announced CoPilot Live USA for iPhone, dropping its price from $35 to $5. What in there?

- voice guided GPS turn-by-turn navigation
- street-level 3D and 2D maps of the United States stored locally on your iPhone
- access to the free ALK MapSure service that provides monthly map improvement updates
- a complete new updated map of USA every quarter through year’s end
- integrated Live Local Search for POIs, graphic lane assist, multi-stop trip planning, and in-app Facebook updating and iPod music controls

But the interesting bit is the add-ons:

- Text-to-Speech (TTS) for spoken street names in your turn-by-turn directions - a $2.99 one time in-app purchase
- access to traffic and fuel prices - $19.99 per year
- Canadian maps - $15.99

- C|net

A review of Skobbler (press release from May), from Cloudmade and built on OSM notes one should keep their expectations of the product low. After ticking off a list of issues (slowness, poor directions and re-routing, limited iPod integration), Mel Martin gets to the heart of the issue:

I think the biggest drawback is the way it operates. If you just want a map of where you are you can’t get one. When Skobbler starts up it wants a destination address. If you don’t input one, no map. There is no “points of interest” database, so if you are looking for the nearest restaurant, gas station or hospital you can forget it. Google shouldn’t be too hard to integrate into Skobbler, and I think the developers should get on it. As a result, the only way to use this app is to specify an address. That really does limit how you can use it. I tend to do a lot of proximity searches, and Skobbler just doesn’t do that.

- TUAW