Blaupunkt Lucca 3.3 review

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Verdict:

A solid, dependable GPS device from car audio company Blaupunkt. The Lucca 3.3 has a clear map display and is good value, but TomTom's one is faster.

Review Date: 14 Feb 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The Lucca 3.3 is Blaupunkt's first foray into the GPS market. Given the company's long history of making desirable and suitably pricey car audio equipment, we were hoping for something rather special.

Like Blaupunkt's audio products, the Lucca 3.3 doesn't go overboard on flashy looks concentrating instead on solid, dependable build quality. It has a refreshingly simple interface exemplified by the main menu, which is comprised of just four icons.

The menu button on the right of the screen brings up the volume and brightness controls, which is a welcome addition as it makes it much easier to get to the volume control when driving. The rest of the system's functions are accessed via the touch screen.

You can enter your destination by typing in a village, town or city name, then putting in the name of the street and house number. Entering a postcode can help narrow down the search, but as the Lucca 3.3 only supports up to five postcode characters, you'll still have to select the name of your road from a list. Another method is to just pick a point on the map, but the map software is so sluggish that it takes forever to find your destination by scrolling around and zooming in and out.

The unit's SiRFstar III GPS receiver takes just a few seconds to get a GPS fix from a cold start. Route calculation is fairly slow though, as the Lucca took nearly a minute and a half to plan a route from central London to Edinburgh. Both the 2D and 3D map displays are detailed, however, and the voice prompts from the built-in speaker are loud and clear.

Many GPS systems have their maps installed on a memory card, but the Lucca's are pre-installed on its 512MB of memory. This leaves the SD card slot free for your own files, and there's a built-in music player, which can play MP3, WMA and OGG files.

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