Article written by Paul, moderator of our forums and
experienced user of GPS Assisted Navigation, first on PocketPCs, then
on AIOs and smartphones. If you have questions or comments you can use this topic in the forums.
IntroductionI
have been writing about GPS for a little over 5 years and have worked
for a GPS software company for a year. The reason I mention this is
that in all that time I have never made a statement like the one I'm
making now: the "Dash Express" by Dash (website)
is, in my opinion, a paradigm changing machine. Automotive GPS will
never be the same after the release of this unit. It takes GPS from a
"get me from here to there" paradigm, to a paradigm in which GPS is
integrated into one's daily life and becomes just another tool to make
all sorts of travel and non-travel related stuff easier and more
convenient. I'll discuss this more later in the review. If you have
questions or comments you can use this topic in the forums.
The Unit
The
Dash Express is a fairly large and heavy unit, weighing in at 13.3
ounces. You can see it perched on my dashboard in the picture above. It
comes with car and home power adapters, a suction mount, an adhesive
disk, an extension arm for the mount and a carrying case. Included,
also, are a printed installation and quick start guide. The quick start
guide is actually pretty good and will answer most of the user's
questions.
The unit uses a 4.3 inch screen with a resolution of
480 x 272. According to the published specs it can run for about 2
hours with the WiFi, GPS and cellular receivers all on. The specs say
it will last 72 hours in the suspend mode. It uses the SiRF III chipset
and Linux for the operating system.
Above
you see the Dash next to a couple of similar-sized units - the Cobra
5200 and the Ipaq 310. As you can see the Dash is substantially
thicker. According to the Dash FAQ the size is necessary to accommodate
the three separate antennas - GPS, WiFi and cellular. I also suspect
that there is a pretty heavy battery in the unit as WiFi is a notorious
power hog and this thing is also in constant cellular contact as well.
To get two solid hours with both running probably accounts for the
unit's weight.
Finally we see a company that actually thinks
about the mount for it's unit, rather than buying the cheapest thing
they can find. Here are some shots:
The
mount is made by PanaVise and has an extremely powerful suction. I
doubt that it will fall off your windshield. Also, the power connection
is through the mount, so you just pull the unit up and off the mount
and leave. No unplugging cords. It makes life more convenient.
What
does NOT make life more convenient is Dash's choice to use flush
touch-sensitive buttons for the Menu and Volume settings. Whenever I
try to readjust the mount I can't help but brush against these buttons
and call up the menu or volume screen. This happens even when just
reaching across the unit on my dashboard. It's sexy, but not very
practical. On the right side of the unit is the on/off switch and a
mini-USB connector. The mains power is connected through this USB port.
The unit doesn't actually shut off when this switch is hit, but goes
into a suspend mode. You can turn the unit off completely from a menu
choice in the Settings menu. It also seems to keep the cellular
connection active, because when I send something to the unit it is
there waiting for me when I turn it on.
The SiRF III performance
is on a par with other units I've tested. I took it into NYC and it had
no trouble maintaining a lock in Midtown, but I didn't get a chance to
subject it to my Wall Street test. One suggestion I would have is that
Dash push updated ephemeris information to the unit to allow for a
quicker lock time. Since the unit is always receiving I don't see why
this couldn't be done rather easily.
Settings
Here is the Settings screen
The
2D map view can be set to car up or North up. The traffic view can be
set to show all traffic, show only live traffic (that which is reported
by Dash units) or show only traffic along the route. Here is where you
fully turn off the unit. In the manage WiFi screen you have a number of
settings
The
Network 1 and Network 2 settings allow you to enter specific network
information such as WEP keys and SSID to allow for connection to
specific networks.
Report
a problem is interesting as it highlights the fact that this is a
connected device. Why not report directly from it. This raises another
important point. The Dash Express, I was told, is designed to be left
in the car. There is no reason to connect it to your computer. Software
updates, firmware updates and map updates are all pushed by Dash (if
you have a subscription) directly to the unit. TomTom Home, for
example, is an excellent program that can do all this, but you have to
remove your unit from the car, boot up your PC or Mac and connect, etc.
With the Dash you just leave it alone and everything happens in the
background. This is part of the paradigm shift - the machine is meant
to be used, not to be connected and disconnected from stuff. It's
maintenance is transparent to the user.
The geek screen is simply the display of currently used GPS satellites.
Notice
what is missing from the settings. For routing there is no "fastest",
"shortest", etc. I'm not quite sure what their thinking is on this
omission, but to be honest I so seldom change my settings on other
programs that I don't find its omission a problem.
GPRS COVERAGE
Dash
uses Jasper Wireless to provide cellular service. Jasper is an
aggregator and can provide coverage over a variety of networks.
However, coverage across the US is not complete. In an out of coverage
area you still will be able to navigate, because the maps are on the
unit, and use the basic POIs. You can check coverage on Dash's website
on the Service page.
I'll divide this rest of the review into three parts,
Routing,
Traffic and
Connections.
If you have questions or comments you can use this topic in the forums.
It
must be remembered that this is a 1.0 version of the routing software.
Some of Dash's competitors are up to version 6, 7 or 8, so it is a bit
unfair to expect Dash to be as sophisticated as they have become over
several years.
The Dash Express uses TeleAtlas maps and contains
only maps of the US. There are no Canadian maps at this time, though it
was hinted to me that they might be coming. There are no plans to offer
European maps. Map updates will be pushed to the unit at least every 6
months as part of the subscription service.
Routing commences from this screen
Favorites are items you enter and store on the Dash. Search I will deal with in the Connections section.
Recent destinations is pretty obvious, as you can see below
Sent
to car are addresses that are sent from your PC to the unit. When they
are saved on the unit, itself, they get added to the address book.
Browse places to go is a combination screen. This is where the built-in
POIs reside. There are about 1 million built-in POIs and they include a
what I would call a set of "basic services".
Note
the Lowe's and Home Depot items. These are searches I sent to the unit
and I'll talk about them later. One very nice thing about this screen
is that you can sort on it. I'm unaware of anyone else who has done
this.
MyDash refers to saved searches that are on your account on the Dash website.
Once
you have chosen a destination the routing engine will give you a choice
of up to 3 routes, as you can see here. Sometimes you get fewer than 3
routes for no apparent reason. As I mentioned, there is no option for
"fastest", "shortest" etc.
You can zoom in, as I did below, to get a better view of the route and see traffic information.
Once
you start driving the display is clear, bright, non-reflective and the
fonts easy to read. Polarized sunglasses are no problem. The Dash uses
a very good text to speech engine. The Dash can display, and recite,
exit numbers, but in what appears to be a bug this is inconsistently
applied. Sometimes it shows and says them, and other times it doesn't.
It tells you what side of the street your destination is on. The
display is "bare bones". Other than lakes and rivers there are very
few, if any landmarks displayed. No parks, railroads, town or city
names, etc. I think that this is a mistake. This is not for the
"prettiness" factor, but because seeing landmarks helps orient the
driver and gives her a better perspective on where she is. The unit
starts off in 2D, but can be switched to 3D, and the Dash
representative told me that the beta testers liked the 2D view better
because they could see the surrounding traffic patterns better.
Here are the turn screens in 3D and 2D
Note
that, in what appears to be a bug, there is a prominent turn arrow in
the 3D mode, but none in the 2D mode. In this regard, also, there is no
"zoom in on turn". This can be an extremely useful feature in congested
areas, or where exits are close together, and should at least be an
option. I hope it is included in future versions.
Speaking of
future versions, there are 3 glaring omissions in the current version
of the software. There is no "avoid road" option. This is an absolute
necessity in congested traffic situations. There is also no ability to
set waypoints or stopovers. Again this is a necessity and will limit
the market as some people, such as real estate agents, find that the
ability to set intermediate stops is a necessity. Multiple stop
optimization should be added, also. Finally, another rather glaring
omission is that there is no simulation mode. You can't sit in the
living room and plot a route, as you need a GPS lock to set a starting
point. This should be corrected ASAP.
As you can see from the
above screens there is minimal clutter on the display. You have the +
and - buttons to zoom in and out. If you tap the compass button you
switch between 3D and 2D modes. The car button on the left re-centers
the screen on your car if you have been panning around. You can, by the
way, drag the screen around to see surrounding areas, but refresh time
was a bit slower that I expected. Still usable, though. On the bottom
right, tapping the button toggles between arrival time, distance left
to travel, or time left to travel. If you tap the car, itself, you'll
get a display of your current location like this:
On
the top left you can see the next turn allow followed by the distance
to the next turn and the street name of the next turn (which,
inconsistently, also displays exit numbers). If you tap this banner you
get a turn-by-turn route list of your route:
In a rather neat little feature, a route summary screen pops up when you have completed your route:
This feature is alos available while driving by tapping the car icon and then Trip Info in the resulting screen.
I
was able to put about 1,200 miles on the Dash and overall was pleased
with the routing. It pretty much followed the excellent routing of
iGuidance, which GPSPassion suggested I use as a "control". What's odd,
though, is that sometimes it give me a routing choice from A to B, and
when I wanted to return it would not display that routing choice in
going from B to A. Since there was no traffic along the routes where it
did this I presume this was a bug of some sort. This raises another
feature request, let's have a backtrack option.
I did also
note that when you go off the calculated route the Dash has a tendency
to re-route you back to the original route for a far longer time than
it should. It really, really wants you to go the original way instead
of recalculating a completely new route. This is typical of early
version software and I hope will be noted by Dash and the re-routing
algorithm will be gradually refined as new versions are issued.
If you have questions or comments you can use this topic in the forums.
Traffic
Traffic
is the main feature that Dash is hyping and, to be honest, the Dash
Express may indeed be the best traffic capable machine around, even
without its own network being built up yet. In the past traffic has
been a rather "kludgey" addition to GPS units. It has been delivered
through the Rube Goldberg method of trying to connect a cellphone to
the GPS over Bluetooth - real consumer friendly right? Or through TMC.
Well, I really don't like having TMC antenna wires all over my
dashboard, held on by suction cups which fall off at the slightest
provocation. Further, in my area of New Jersey, only 30 miles from NYC,
it is almost impossible to get good TMC reception and no unit I've
tried has worked worth a >>>>>>>.
Dash's
idea is to use the connectivity inherent in WiFi and cellular networks
to 1. tap into the current database of traffic information and 2.
create their own database of traffic info in real time from the Dash
Express, itself.
As to item 1, Dash uses traffic information
from Inrix, a recognized traffic provider, 3rd party sensors and
historical information. In addition to this, Dash updates the
historical traffic data once a month so the units become smarter over
time. The Dash rep told me that Dash uses 10 times more road segments
than anyone else and so can average traffic over more segments than
other units.
As to item 2, the real Dash innovation is to take
data from the Dash Express units and calculate traffic flows in real
time from its own subscribers. According to the Dash rep they only need
hundreds of units in a medium sized city and 2 to 3 thousand in a large
metropolitan area to get reliable traffic information. Part of the
reason for this is that Dash not only takes the traffic info from the
Dash Express units, but also uses the units to validate in-place
traffic sensors and assign confidence levels to their output. Thus they
can ignore sensors that are unreliable, and vice versa, and so get a
larger, valid pool of traffic info than from just unit the Express
units alone.
One piece of fallout from all this is that the Dash
Express is the only unit that can give you reliable traffic info on 2
lane non-highway roads - if the network builds up. I had an experience
with this myself. The unit displays traffic by showing green, yellow,
orange and red lines, either solid or dashed. Solid lines indicate
traffic info from the Dash network, what they call Live Traffic, and
dotted lines from historical, sensor or other data. Gray or white means
no data.
Well, I drove from home to my bank up Route 202, a 2
lane NJ state road. On the drive up the line was white - no traffic
data. I was rather surprised to see on my way back that the white line
had changed to solid green. The Dash network recorded by passage north
and saw no traffic, so displayed this on my return trip south.
It
is really difficult to test traffic services and so I can't speak to
the accuracy of their information. I did do a round trip drive to
Washington, DC, but that was on Easter Sunday, when traffic is low. I
did not get into any traffic, but I noticed some slowdowns on the other
direction on several occasions, and in each instance the Dash showed a
solid red line in the places where the slowdowns occurred.
On
the day I picked up my evaluation unit, I drove home at a peak traffic
hour. After I set up the unit in the parking lot, I noticed that it
gave me a "strange" route that I had never seen before, so I followed
it. What it was doing was routing me around the massive backup that
always occurs at the Lincoln Tunnel and the New Jersey Turnpike (my
usual route) at the time I left Port Imperial on the Hudson River. This
was pretty encouraging.
Here are a few Dash traffic screens so
you can get a feeling for how they display the traffic info. On the
Dash unit you can zoom in on these screens and get finer detail:
One
thing is not clear from the Dash literature or Quick Start Guide. What
happens if you are driving along on a Green route and suddenly a
traffic problem pops up on your way? I sent an email to Dash to ask
about this and they replied: "If traffic gets congested along a route
that a Dash driver is driving on, and that congestion increases the
travel time for the driver by a significant amount (say more than 5
minutes), than the Dash will give the user a traffic alert, notifying
them of the delay along with giving them the option to go back to the
alternative routes screen to see if there is a better route to take. We
strongly believe in giving consumers the choice of staying on their
current route, or getting onto an alternative route."
Side note:
When I picked up the unit from Dash I asked the rep about whether the
WiFi option was really useful, as I was a bit skeptical about it. He
told me that, much to Dash's surprise, they were finding that they are
getting far more WiFi connectivity than they expected.
Paradigm shift 1
So how is the paradigm shifting so far?
We
have gone from a GPS unit that is really an accessory of your computer
(to which it needs to be connected to be updated), to a unit that
stands alone and updates itself whenever necessary.
We have
gone from a GPS unit which uses other communication devices, such as
cellphones, to try to receive information, or which uses unreliable
radio signals to try to achieve the same thing, to a unit that uses the
always on cellular network, or even faster WiFi network, to seamlessly
retrieve information.
We have gone from a unit that is
designed to take traffic information to a unit that not only validates
or invalidates that information, but also creates its own, using the
"standard" traffic information as a supplement, not as a prime source
of data.
So let's move on and now see how this unit becomes part of your normal life's communication, just like the cellphone has become.
If you have questions or comments you can use this topic in the forums.
Connections
What
the iPhone has done to the handset industry, Dash has done to the PND
industry with this device. How about making your GPS interactive?
Here's
an example. Suppose you are at home and want to buy a cigar. It's
unlikely that the list of POIs on the Dash, or any device, will include
a cigar store. So all you have to do is go to your account at the
MyDash website, do a search for cigars and then send it to your
machine. This search can then be saved on the machine and used over and
over. This is what I did with the Home Depot and Lowe's searches you
see in the screen shots below.
Here's a shot of the searches
portion of the website. On the right are all my searches that I have
saved. Notice the Lowe's and Home Depot ones at the top. On the left
are a collection of searches done by other people that you have access
to. The difference between a search and an address is that a search
will return all the Home Depots in an area, not just one single address.
When a search arrives you get this screen on your Dash:
In addition to searches, you can send individual addresses from your Dash home page to the unit.
Here's how you are notified and then here's a shot of what happens when you click on View:
If you open the address you get a complete card, including the telephone number.
I
don't need to tell you how incredibly convenient this is. To make it
even easier, Dash has developed a plugin for Safari, Firefox, Internet
Explorer, and Outlook 2003. Just highlight an address in these browsers
or Outlook, right click and send the address to your unit. Here's a
shot. Notice the Send to Car in the list:
This
feature makes the Dash part of your daily life. Suppose your wife is
out driving and wants to go to a restaurant you went to 6 months ago.
All she has to do is call you and ask for the info, and then you send
her the address, along with the telephone number and she can
automatically route to it. To be honest, I think this feature is
probably more important in the long run than the traffic features of
the device. Small business, delivery services and other such companies
can make great use of this ability.
Of course, the connectivity
features mean that searching from the Dash, itself, is a whole
different ballgame. No longer are you tied to a static list of POIs,
but you can do a real time search on any keyword using Yahoo local. For
example, I'm going out later today to look at cultured stone samples
for the garage I'm building. A "home improvement" search on any unit's
POI database won't work, because this is a specialty item that stores
such a Lowe's don't carry. However I can do a search on "cultured
stone" and find exactly where I need to go. This feature obsoletes any
of the static POI databases in other PNDs today - no matter how many
they may contain.
On the Dash website you can also do searches
on GeoRss feeds, but I have no idea what this is and, unfortunately,
Dash doesn't explain it very well. If anyone reading this can explain
it to us please post a comment.
Generally I have had no problems
with connectivity on the device. I did note that it didn't want to
connect to my WiFi on a couple of occasions, but after a reset it
connected without any problems. I don't know the reason for this. On
the road I have never seen a dropped connection in this area (NY, NJ
and the DC corridor).
Side note: One neat byproduct of the
connectivity features is that if your unit is stolen you just call Dash
and they will remotely disable it!
Paradigm shift 2
Take
a normal PND and change it from a stand-alone device into a connected,
interactive unit that can become part of your daily life.
Pricing
The
big surprise at my meeting with Dash what the low $399 price that they
announced. Given that this unit has more features than most of the
higher priced machines this is sure to shake up the market a bit
(especially since the Magellan Maestro Elite 5340 GPRS unit has a list
price of $1,300). For the first 30 days, starting March 27, Dash has an
exclusive with Amazon. They wouldn't discuss distribution after that.
In
addition to the initial purchase price you need to sign up for their
interactive service. This runs $12.99 for a month to month plan, $10.99
for a 1 year plan and $9.99 for a 2 year plan. You would be wise,
however, to check Dash's coverage map on their website as not all of
the US is currently covered.
Conclusion
As
you can gather I'm more than enthusiastic about the Dash Express. It
has a few teething problems, but nothing too serious or that can't be
corrected. GPS won't be the same after this.
If you have questions or comments you can use this topic in the forums.
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