Just thought I'd add to this thread as I have both Sygic and Copilot with live traffic enabled in both cases.
I tested their redirection abilities today, on hearing of an overturned vehicle on the M1 near Nottingham. I plotted a route with both from Chesterfield to Derby.
Copilot is clearly better integrated with its live traffic service, which is provided by Navteq. You can set a threshold for traffic delay for it to search for a better route. At the threshold it will tell you about the traffic detected and if it can find a better way round. If it finds a faster route you can switch to it with a single button press. For the test above, it detected a 40 minute delay on the M1 and offered to route via the A38.
Sygic detected a 25 minute delay and no re-route was offered. It's possible to manually route around it but this takes a few button presses and would be much more of a faff while driving than the single Co-Pilot button press. By manually indicating I wanted to avoid it, sygic saved about 10 minutes. As I had the function to automatically route around traffic enabled I queried this with the developer. It turns out that it will only auto-divert if the route is actually blocked - much less convenient than Co-pilot's system.
Another difference is integration of Traffic with routing. Copilot seems to integrate traffic flow data for all motorways, dual carriageways and most single carriageway A-Roads in its routing estimates and it offers 3 routes. This flow info over-rides the road input speed options for practically all Motorways and Dual Carriageways and some A-Roads. This over-rides the input values for preferred road speeds input by the user (I use 70mph for motorways and dual carriageways, 40mph for primary routes, 30mph for secondary routes and 20mph for local routes - tried using 60 for primary but it gave very weird routing for anywhere that didn't have live traffic). This works very well in Sheffield where the mapping has A-roads as primary routes. There Co-Pilot seems to give very similar routes to the IQroutes / HDtraffic routes given on Tomtom's website. It works less well in Chestefield where the mapping has B roads (with no live traffic data) as primary routes.
Sygic's traffic is provided by Inrix. It seems to work on delay time rather than flow-rate. In practice this means that traffic doesn't affect routing much unless there is an actual incident with associated delay detected on route. I've also compared Inrix's coverage vs Navteq's and the latter seems to have more complete coverage on single carriageway A roads round here.
Sygic is much prettier and seems to give more sensible routes near where I live before the traffic comes into play. Having said that - Co-Pilot's traffic integration gives it the edge. I'll probably move to using Copilot as my main navigation. Still, it's irritating that there have to be any button presses. I'd like an option to just auto-reroute to save delays. I hate button pressing on the move.
Edit: Now got Navigon too. First impressions are good. TTS voice direction is as good as Sygic, routing is sensible so far and traffic re-routing can be automated. I've not had chance to test the traffic redirection implementation yet though.
I tested their redirection abilities today, on hearing of an overturned vehicle on the M1 near Nottingham. I plotted a route with both from Chesterfield to Derby.
Copilot is clearly better integrated with its live traffic service, which is provided by Navteq. You can set a threshold for traffic delay for it to search for a better route. At the threshold it will tell you about the traffic detected and if it can find a better way round. If it finds a faster route you can switch to it with a single button press. For the test above, it detected a 40 minute delay on the M1 and offered to route via the A38.
Sygic detected a 25 minute delay and no re-route was offered. It's possible to manually route around it but this takes a few button presses and would be much more of a faff while driving than the single Co-Pilot button press. By manually indicating I wanted to avoid it, sygic saved about 10 minutes. As I had the function to automatically route around traffic enabled I queried this with the developer. It turns out that it will only auto-divert if the route is actually blocked - much less convenient than Co-pilot's system.
Another difference is integration of Traffic with routing. Copilot seems to integrate traffic flow data for all motorways, dual carriageways and most single carriageway A-Roads in its routing estimates and it offers 3 routes. This flow info over-rides the road input speed options for practically all Motorways and Dual Carriageways and some A-Roads. This over-rides the input values for preferred road speeds input by the user (I use 70mph for motorways and dual carriageways, 40mph for primary routes, 30mph for secondary routes and 20mph for local routes - tried using 60 for primary but it gave very weird routing for anywhere that didn't have live traffic). This works very well in Sheffield where the mapping has A-roads as primary routes. There Co-Pilot seems to give very similar routes to the IQroutes / HDtraffic routes given on Tomtom's website. It works less well in Chestefield where the mapping has B roads (with no live traffic data) as primary routes.
Sygic's traffic is provided by Inrix. It seems to work on delay time rather than flow-rate. In practice this means that traffic doesn't affect routing much unless there is an actual incident with associated delay detected on route. I've also compared Inrix's coverage vs Navteq's and the latter seems to have more complete coverage on single carriageway A roads round here.
Sygic is much prettier and seems to give more sensible routes near where I live before the traffic comes into play. Having said that - Co-Pilot's traffic integration gives it the edge. I'll probably move to using Copilot as my main navigation. Still, it's irritating that there have to be any button presses. I'd like an option to just auto-reroute to save delays. I hate button pressing on the move.
Edit: Now got Navigon too. First impressions are good. TTS voice direction is as good as Sygic, routing is sensible so far and traffic re-routing can be automated. I've not had chance to test the traffic redirection implementation yet though.
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