Blaupunkt TravelPilot Lucca 3.3 review

Blaupunkt is best known for its car stereos, but it also makes standalone GPS navigation systems.

The Lucca 3.3 is a budget unit with preinstalled UK and Ireland maps. Like the company's car stereos, the TravelPilot's design is functional rather than flashy. The 31/2in screen is flanked by a power button and a menu button that brings up the volume and brightness controls. Most GPS systems require you to go through a couple of steps to change the volume, so the Lucca's short-cut button makes it less distracting to change these settings.

The Lucca's menu system is simple, with just four icons for destination entry, the map, settings and your home address. You can set the software to avoid motorways, toll roads and ferries, but our unit didn't recognise London's congestion charge. Like most GPS systems, you find your destination by entering a village, town or city name followed by a street name or a postcode. Unfortunately, the Lucca 3.3 supports only the first five characters of UK postcodes, so once you've narrowed down your search you must select the road name from a list.

The menu system runs reasonably quickly, but it's not as smooth as those on TomTom's One or Mio's DigiWalker C250. There is also a Point of Interest database, which lets you pick your destination from categories such as petrol stations, restaurants or hotels.

The Lucca's SiRFstar III GPS receiver takes hardly any time to find a satellite lock, but route calculation is slow. It took 22 seconds to plan a route from Central to South London, and a minute and a half to plan a route to Edinburgh. The map display is also slow. Scrolling around the 2D view and zooming in and out takes an age, and once you've brought up the menu screen it takes a long time to go back to the map.

Both the 2D and 3D displays are clear, however, with detailed maps and a large arrow indicating the next turn, as well as supplementary information such as altitude on the right-hand side. Voice prompts are also clear, and the built-in speaker is loud. There's an excellent roadblock feature, which lets you specify the length of the blockage, from 200 metres to 50 kilometres.

The Lucca 3.3's maps are preinstalled on its 512MB internal memory, which leaves the SD card slot free. You can use your own SD card to play MP3, Wav, WMV and Ogg files with the built-in music player. The built-in speaker sounds surprisingly good, but music through headphones is overly bright.

Blaupunkt's TravelPilot Lucca 3.3 is a simple, good-value GPS system, but its mapping software runs slowly. TomTom's One or Mio's DigiWalker C250 are easier to use and have more features.

Author: Chris Finnamore