DASH EXPRESS - CONNECTED NAVIGATION 1.0 - gpspassion.com

Part I - Introduction - The Unit - Settings - Coverage

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.

DASH EXPRESS - CONNECTED NAVIGATION 1.0
Advanced Traffic - GPRS - SiRFstarIII - Yahoo Local - TeleAtlas - $10/month - WiFi

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INDEX : I. Introduction / II. Routing / III. Traffic / IV. Connections and Conclusion

I 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.

If you have questions or comments you can use this topic in the forums.

Part II - Routing

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.

Part III - Traffic

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.

Part IV - Connections and Conclusion

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.