European car maker Seat is offering a new breed of GPS navigation system which is DVD based but plus comes with a 30GB hard disk drive. that new add-on will set you back £1,595 - way above what you would pay for an after market GPS navigation system.

The device is actually built by Siemens and the mapping input comes from Navteq. The new sat nav systems is available for order as an option on all Leon, Altea, Altea XL, Altea Freetrack 4 and Toledo models.

Seat’s new GPS navigation systems feature a large, 6.5″ touch screen and it additionally doubles as a CD/DVD player capable of handling various file formats including CD-A, MP3, WAV and WMA. On top of that, it can read

from most mainstream media types such as CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW etc.

With these DVD-based GPS navigation systems what comes to mind usually is whether you can listen to music or watch something while navigating. With Seat, that is possible but you’ll have to store the whole mapping info on to the HDD. However you’ll still have 20GB of space left for your other files. Oh, and about watching DVD’s on your console: Only when the vehicle is stationary.

Other upgrades with the new system or the ability to get live traffic updates, and the bluetooth communication pack for pairing with cell phones. You can additionally use the AUX-IN to plug and play your portable music players.

Original post by Dave Rubert