Blaupunkt TravelPilot Lucca 3.5 GPS Unit

Having a GPS device never made any sense to me, especially since I’ve always wondered about the badly planned civic conditions, and the city’s lanes that I use more often than the main roads. Also, the constantly changing face of our city can sometimes leave you at a dead-end, with debris from dug-up roads staring you in the face.

But I was wrong, in more ways than one. You can most certainly benefit from the endless routing options the Blaupunkt TravelPilot throws at you. Plus, those leaving town ever so often can really make the most of this GPS unit. And guess what, it even has turn-by turn voice guidance.

Design
The TravelPilot series is quite abundant, with each offering different features, some better than the others. But the 3.5 Edition is one of the best on offer. The main element of the GPS unit happens to be the responsive touchscreen. The 4.3-inch wide TFT-LCD color display has a resolution of 480 x 272 pixels.

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Based on where you plan to keep the GPS in the car, the point of contact changes accordingly. I had it pinned to the suction cup holder, which was in turn stuck to my windshield glass. At that distance, there were times when I’ve had to use my fingernails, and the touchscreen worked fine.

There are no buttons, save the Volume keys and the Start/Shut button right below the screen. Included in the packaging is a car charger, which isn’t always required, but when you start it first the GPS unit quickly recharges sufficiently to navigate for a few hours at least.

What makes the TravelPilot Lucca 3.5 so interesting is that it aims to offer more than just navigation. To the right you will see the SD card slot, which can be used to store music and pictures – it has some multimedia features, which we will talk about in the next section.

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Features

At the onset I will highlight what is of prime importance, and something that I tested prior to anything else – the anti-reflectivity. It sucks! Although the screen automatically changes the map’s color scheme depending to the time of the day and GPS position, if there’s direct sunlight on the screen you will not see a thing. Also, stick it close to the top of the windshield where it won’t affect your line of vision.

The map’s very colorful during day (sticking to sheet map colors), but it turns black in the night, with routes highlighted in blue. On my way to Pune and back, on the expressway I noticed that the map changes color while passing through the tunnel.

There are two modes – simple and advanced. It makes sense for there’s a lot of tweaking once can do in advanced mode, while the simple mode only understands navigation from A to B. The unit is equipped with Centrality Atlas III Dual Core processor 400 MHz ARM9 266 MHz DSP with 64MB SDRAM, which explains the promptness. It also comes with an internal memory of 1GB.

To make life simpler you can choose from four options: Fast, Short, Economical, and Easy. I have yet to ascertain the difference between Short and Fast though – it gave me the same results in both. I like keeping it at Fast for obvious reasons, and it made a lot of difference while reaching MG road in Pune. The best thing is you are more likely to know the route taken by a transport bus, and trust me there are more ways than one to get into a city.

In advanced mode you navigate based on your final destination, which can be the street name, but also based on a POI (point of interest), and lastly coordinates. The easiest way is to enter the legal street name and hit street midpoint on the screen. The GPS unit is also equipped with a route demonstration option that simulates exactly how it plans to take you. You can enter a diversion for petrol, food or if you think you would like to take a less beaten track.

The GPS unit has a high learning curve, and on your daily route will highlight routes regularly taken by you. You get two viewing options: 2D and 3D. There’s a full QWERTY keyboard to type the street name, and to save time it shows up a probable list of letters (as per the list of built-in street names) on the keyboard as soon as you start typing.

But since we are in India, where you will find at least 10 MG Roads, the GPS will list all the MG roads with the name of the station it falls under. However, one major error I found in the GPS unit is that it does not distinguish between public and private roads. While coming from Mulund in northern Mumbai, it kept showing me a route to Borivali through the National Park. The road does exist, but only for forest officers and the military.

There are other problems but they happen to be city-specific. For instance, Pune has something called the Walking Plaza, which means MG road is out of bound for cars on Saturday. I didn’t know that, and neither did my GPS. It’s not the GPS’s fault; it’s something I should have found out beforehand.

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The device does, however, have a very important feature called Safety Mode. While driving I tried changing locations, which was perhaps quite unwise on my part, thus endangering myself and others driving on the road. Next I found the safety mode that disables the touchscreen whenever car goes beyond 10 kmph, so you can’t try and use the unit while driving. Deep!

Once the map is loaded you can zoom in or out easily and even drag the map to wherever you like. The voice guidance is pretty good, and it helps that it alerts you to take turns well in advance. Some advanced features include asking the driver to keep left/right for a turn.

The unit comes with a handful of cool multimedia features. A 3.5mm jack helps in routing music to your main deck via aux-in, and if you lack that privilege the inbuilt speakers work just fine. It supports playback of MP3, WMA and OGG file formats, and can also display pictures in JPEG, BMP and GIF formats. The SD card interface can handle up to 4GB, so that’s not bad either.

Verdict and Conclusion

The TravelPilot Lucca 3.5 costs Rs 21,990, which is a good price. You have to remember it merely aids in navigating, and that eventually the decision to turn left or right, or to even follow the instructions to the turn, is really your own. Within the city I find my own knowledge of the roads better than that of the GPS unit. But this is because there are so many ways to avoid main roads and take the lanes.

However, not everyone’s gifted with a map of the city in their heads, so having this if you own a car is a great gift. Women driving home late can find solace that they will never get lost. To sum up, we recommend the product and feel it’s a great accessory for your car.