When I was a child Blaupunkt was considered as a great brand. It was hard to obtain and anything that had the blue spot on it was incredibly expensive. Of course back in those days stuff had become mystical much easier, even simple things made many people happy. Those were the times when I got my first mobile cassette recorder from Germany and everyone looked curiously on me when I was listening to it on the street. Back then Blaupunkt was an unquestionable brand, and then came the change of methods.

The brand disappeared and there came others in its place. When I met it again it was much debunked. Of course I knew that they are producing car audio systems, and then I have seen a couple of their products at CeBITs, but we didn’t manage to lay our hands on one of them until now. Well, thanks to Speedshop one of their devices has landed on our desk. Although it’s nothing new, it has been on the market for almost a year now, but it’s price has decreased to an acceptable level by now, so we do not only show it, but we can also recommend it.

The Blaupunkt empire is under construction since 1923, but not many people know that nowadays they are creating new stuff every year as part of the Bosch group, so we can say that they are one of the innovators of the industry. However we cannot see any innovation in the subject of this review and I really missed it. When using it I had the feeling I had towards Uncle Steve, who came visiting regularly. Always on Sundays and always at the same time and he always brought chocolates. And he always wore the same artificial leather coat. I didn’t like him because of the chocolates, but for his consistency.

Let’s see what does this artificial leather coat is hiding. The box won’t cause us an esthetical orgasm; we have seen much more spectacular ones. It has the device, a passive holder, a car charger, manuals and a DVD inside it. The passive holder is possibly one of the simplest ones on the world, but that makes it great: a big cap with fixings in two places. The whole thing is not longer than 10 cm. It’s rock steady, it won’t be shaking ever.

When taking the navin my hand I really had that Uncle Steve feeling. Blaupunkt has probably fired its last designer 10 years ago and since then they are working from the plans they have. The device is really old-fashioned, but I’ll even go further: it’s ugly. I just can’t believe they only had an axe when creating the shapes. Real antique German design. A prism. It’s neither slim, nor small. The combination of black and silver colors is broken only by two small spots. On the front there is the 3.5” TFT screen, while on the left there is the main switch and the menu key. On the top there is nothing to be seen besides a GPS label imprinted in the plastic surface. On the left we can see the 3.5 mm headset connector; under this we have the SD/MMC card slot with the fastening hole for the neckband near it. Who the hell will put this around his neck?

On the right the only thing we can see is the charger’s connector. On the bottom there is a miniUSB connector, but unfortunately Lucca cannot be charged through USB. On the left side of its back there is the grating of the speaker, on the right there is the lid of the battery, fastened with a screw. There is a gap on the back, this is what we have to hinge in the passive holder’s clench. It will never fall off, or break; it’s simply genial and simple at the same time.

The puritan box has an interesting interior inside it. Instead of the most widespread Samsung processor we have an Atlas Dual Core inside the navi, which is built up of an ARM9 300MHz CPU and a 200 MHz DSP coprocessor, providing a quite fine speed while navigating in the menu but it didn’t impress me during navigation. Somehow I had the feeling that it always falls behind reality in speed. The operating system is the usual Windows CE Core 5.0. There is 512 MB flash memory inside; the navigation software is installed here, which is a highly customized iGO 2006. Earlier Navigon has been the solution supplier of the company, but iGO’s success convinced the Germans to make the change, and this decision has been a very fortunate one from our point of view, as maps of the region are much more detailed (even though other companies are catching up too).

GPS signals are handled by a built-in Centrality GPS receiver, which does a fine and accurate job, it maintained connection even amongst the tall buildings downtown. The software of course needs some time to get accustomed to, as almost everything is elsewhere. For example: instead of the good old QWERTY keyboard from iGO we have an ABC-ordered sort of letters when searching, which might make computer users go through some pain. The brightness level of the display is good enough even in bright sunlight.

The speaker has a reasonable volume, but sound quality was a disappointment, I had been expecting something much better. The software on the DVD helps us maintaining our maps, but of course only if we buy a memory card, so we can have the full Europe map at us. Theoretically the updates also take place through this program, which event will hopefully be a smooth and regular one.

Lucca can also be used for viewing pictures and listening to music, but we again have to face the limits set by the size of the internal memory. The media player is very plain; it does what it has to but we shouldn’t expect anything extra from it. Beyond these the device is not capable of functioning as a Bluetooth handsfree, and we also shouldn’t even think of using it as an FM transmitter.

There is not a word about the capacity of the built-in battery, but unofficial sources have mentioned 3 hours of operation time. Unfortunately this is not true, at least in the case of the one I had been testing. I hope this problem was a unique one, but this made the problem of the impossibility of USB charging even more serious.

At the moment of writing this article the navi costs almost 245 EUR, with a full Europe map included, which is still too expensive, considering the features; for such a price many other competitors are a better buy. Of course those who stick to this brand won’t be disappointed very much, as the device performs pretty well, but it doesn’t look good and it doesn’t have enough features, compared to other navis of the category. It’s just Blaupunkt.