Whilst Co-Pilot is great sat-nav software on the HTC Touch HD, its live traffic service (an extra £34 for two year licence) is a bit ‘hit and miss’. So in addition to Co-Pilot, I also use a great piece of Windows Mobile software called ‘Traffic TV’ which uses the UK’s Trafficmaster network and gives live indications of congestion and slow traffic speeds on all of the UK’s A-roads and motorways. Windows Mobile allows multi-tasking and so it possible to run Traffic TV in the foreground and to have Co-Pilot giving voice directions while running as a background process.

Traffic TV displays a zoom-able map of the UK, and includes GPS support so the zoomed in map can follow your position in real-time. An extra bonus of Traffic TV is that motorway CCTV camera positions are shown on the map, and you can select a camera to see live images (of the Dartford Road Crossing for example).  Otherwise, congestion is shown as a series of symbols which are red to indicate stationary traffic, orange to show very slow traffic/congestion, and yellow to show slow traffic. As the data is received live from the 8000 cameras in the Trafficmaster network, you can be confident that the traffic information can be relied on and is current (my main complaint with the ALK Co-Pilot live traffic system is that out of date info is displayed…).

If you combine Co-Pilot and Traffic TV with the newly updated SPB Mobile Shell (as a replacement for TouchFlo 3D) then you can create a custom desktop which just has your essential driving items (you can quickly flick between three separate ‘lifestyle’desktops with Mobile Shell V3!). My uncluttered ‘driving desktop’ screen just has a Traffic TV icon, a Co-Pilot icon, Profiles icon and a Backlight icon (plus battery and time). This makes the Touch HD a great travel companion; links to purchase them all are shown below:

• HTC Touch HD (Sim Free)
• Traffic TV
• CoPilot Live 7 Windows Mobile UK & Ireland (contact ALK for free upgrade to WVGA version)
• SPB Mobile Shell V3