I have used GPS for years and have owned virtually every major band sold. This has cost me in the thousands of dollars. CoPilot Live is a perfect addition to the iPhone for an occasional use app. It compares favorably with stand alone PND of the last few years.

It has text to speech if you choose Frank as the voice. You can drop the iPhone in your pocket with the screen off and listen to the directions over the iPhone speaker with the volume turned up.

I do not place any GPS for casual use in the car or truck anymore because so many urban thieves will smash the window to grab it. If you leave a dock in plain view they will still smash the window to see if it is under your seat or in the glove compartment.

I am against funding the drug habits of this scum so the iPhone GPS app without a dock is the perfect solution for the few times I need it. I always have it in my pocket for instant use.

To freak someone out start CoPilot Live, plot a route, start review in demo mode and drop it in your pocket and walk around a store. ;>)

The pricing of this product makes no sense.

I’m not sure I’ll ever accept a mobile phone to be my navigation system. My cars’ factory installed units have huge screens, which allow you to more quickly see direction, so that you keep your eyes on the road more. I have a Garmin on my motorcycle, and it’s just built to be on a motorcycle (big giant letters that respond to gloved hands, waterproof, and XM radio.

Like cameras on cell phones, which have cheap lenses, cheap sensors, and terrible shutter and ISO speeds, a navigation system on the iPhone is a compromise and can’t replace standalone systems. I’ll take a quick picture with my iPhone. I’ll take a detailed photograph with my Nikon. If I’m walking around London, I can use the free Maps app to figure out where I am. When I want to drive from point A to point B in a rural area, I want a real Nav system.

The price for the hardware is outrageous, but the more people buy it, the less likely the price tag will decrease.

To look at it another way, this is like already having a TomTom Standalone unit without the software maps or mount, and having to pay way over the odds to actually use it as a full Sat Nav.

Surely, it won’t be long before the competitors out there release a similar mount with the same features, let’s hope with a FM Transmitter too, for a more realistis price and steal the market from right under TomTom’s greedy little noses.

I have an ipod touch and hoped this would work out, but at that price, no way. I went for the Droid (love it!), ’nuff said. This option is simply priced out of the market, but I’m sure there will be enough folks with deep pockets that’ll buy it so they can show it off.

Cell-based nav isn’t as bad as you think. I use Google Maps all the time on my iPhone and it simply caches the most recent image on your phone so you can pull it up (including a decent zoom and pan radius) even when you don’t have reception. I’m sure they’ve done something similar with Google Nav, or at least will do in the future.

Of course, if you’re going on a trip into the Mountains or something where you won’t have signal for awhile – I can see it being a problem. But in (sub)urban areas where you can access cell connection at least every 2-5 miles, cell-based navigation should be fine. Haven’t tried it yet, though, so I can’t say for sure.

Completely agree that search could be better in the TomTom app. But I’ve gotten around it by searching for my destination in Google Maps, creating a contact, then pulling up the contact in TomTom. No copy/paste or address memorization required. Yeah, you end up having a bunch of extra contacts in your app, but I’ve created a group to keep track of them, so they’re easier to manage (and delete periodically). That said, it’s a kludgy workaround. My hope is that TomTom will improve the search/integration eventually.

I also agree that free Google navigation will be a game-changer. But on-board maps that don’t require a cell connection will always have some appeal. The last time I used a cell-based nav app was on an older WinMo device, and it worked, but the map refresh rate was pretty slow. I haven’t used any of the more recent cell-based nav apps, and I’d hope there has been some improvement. Even so, there’s security in knowing that I’m not dependent on cell service to get my navigation to work.