Becker are part of the Harman group, more renowned for their in-car audio systems, rather than SatNavs. The Traffic Assist 7977 has inherited some of the companies’ audio heritage, but at the same time it brings to the table Navigon-style Reality view and Lane Assistant features for a balanced product.

The Becker 7977 has a boxy look, with little design floruish – but its colour scheme is attractive and either side of the screen you will find adjustable (red/blue) mood lighting.

While the software is controlled largely through the touch screen there are a few buttons on the casing, including a jog wheel for adjusting the volume and a red button at the front for use as a secondary on/off switch and menu navigation, as well as a USB data carrier port, which can be used for plugging in a separate USB device containing either mp3 or images.

A red theme seems to run throughout the interface and upon start-up you are greeted with large icons enabling access to your Multimedia, TMC, Telephone (Bluetooth hands free) or Navigation software.

Normally we would not mention the multimedia side of things, which so often seems to be an afterthought, but the mp3 audio output was particularly loud and clear. However its performance was not so impressive when trying to run our hi-res test video at full screen.

From a cold start the navigation software does take a while to load and boots to a couple of icons which grant you access to your navigation options and map view, there is also a wide open space beneath the icons which fills up with previous routes as you go along – which is a handy addition.

In operation the menus or switching to your map/night mode for the first time seemed sluggish, but once the software is cached into memory everything does become a lot smoother and as long as you turn off the device using the secondary on/off switch you won’t have a repeat problem. Saying that a firmware upgrade also helped with the above.

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