GPS News: Blaupunkt Automotive GPS
This is Blaupunkt's first portable car GPS unit, and it also happens to be the first ever portable GPS that plays music, photos and can pipe voice directions over your car speakers.
The Blaupunkt Lucca will come in two versions, a 370Pounds that adhere's to the windshield and a 430Pounds Smart Cradle edition that - needs to be installed by a pro. The upgrade to the cradle based system seems like a worthwhile step because it allows the unit to pipe the voice directions and the MP3/WMA tunes over your stereo speakers.
Right now the news is coming out of the Berlin IFA Gadget Show, so the launch info is targeted at European countries for now. The GPS is built-in, maps are stored on SD card - the UK & Ireland come preloaded and Europe fits on a 512MB - and the interface is controlled entirely by a 3.5in touchscreen. When you're not using the Lucca as a sat-nav or a stereo, you can also use it to run slideshows of your jpegs. Why? Why not? Blaupunkt's expecting both version of the Lucca to be on sale by mid October in the UK. Prices could change.
So What?
So at a 430Pounds price point (roughly $780 - US), you would need to compare to the RoadMate 700 vs. StreetPilot c340 vs. the StreetPilot 2720. So the Blaupunkt system has some nice play through the speakers features, but the Roadmate 700, the StreetPilot c340 and the StreetPilot 2720 all have hard drive based map systems, which greatly increases the convenience of the whole thing. Huh, we'll see when the thing actually hits the market and see what the technical specs are to find out if it's worth it.
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Posted by Scott Martin at September 3, 2005 1:50 PM
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