Customer Reviews

Good product but can be much better.....
Updated April 17th, 2008. Unfortunately Amazon will not allow me to change the star rating but as of today, I am officially downgrading the product rating to 3 stars. From very good/great to just good. Please see Cons sections (7) for details.

Let me start this off by saying that I have used all major brands of GPS.

Magellan (1st Gen + 2nd Gen [Maestro]), Garmin (1st Gen + 2nd Gen [Nuvi]), and Mio 230. Sadly, of all the above, my favorite was the 1st gen Magellan.

A summary of what I think of the other devices:

1) Magellan Maestro: Good GPS hampered by a mule of a cpu and horrible software stability. The sucker is slow and crashes like no other. It could've been good but instead became a liability.

2) Garmin Nuvi: Better than Magellan, very stable but has no predictive type-ahead addressing. Garmin need to pull their head out of their thighs and add this feature. Very little faults but also nothing to shout about and not to mention the most expensive. Way over-priced.

3) Mio: Best screen contrast/resolution out of the 3. Very smooth resolution and gps update. It's way too chatty. I do not need to be alerted of every bend in the highway. Suffers from usability problems and just plain to hard to use. No left or right street announcement for destination.

Now the initial review for Dash Express
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Pros:

1) Excellent screen resolution and brightness. More on the brightness later.

2) Traffic flow is magical. Has to be seen to appreciate. Extremely accurate traffic data. Based on recent events I believe there is a 5-10 minute lag between real-world traffic and sigalert/push to dash.

3) Usability is top notch. Simply the easiest GPS I have used to date.

4) Minimalism. Have you seen GPS where there are so many stuff on screen that you can't even see the map? Dash is smart for presenting a beautiful and minimalistic layout where the emphasis is given to the map, as a GPS should. Finally!

5) Automatic Re-routing is both fast and accurate.

6) Routing so far has been excellent.

7) Very responsive. Touch operations are responsive and consistent.

8) Wifi supports WPA/WPA2.

9) Left/Right side of street is spoken for destination. Mio does not do this.

10) The only device to give me the route I actually take from my home to my parents' house. Not sure if it's luck or based on traffic info.

Cons:

1) Screen is too bright for night operation, even when tuned to lowest brightness. Hopefully they fix this. It appears they are using a very dark gray of blue for the night background when they should use pure-black for better contrast.

2) Cannot accurately judge car direction when coming from stand still to very slow motion. Think turning on the car in a parking lot.

3) Text to Speech quality on street names is bad. The spoken content is concise and excellent but the street names voice renders are just bad. Has a lot of trouble with Spanish street names. Half the streets in Los Angeles are Spanish based. For example, Cordova St is pronounced as Cord-"ee"-va Ave. Even worse, Virginia Road is spoken as Virgi-"ne" Road. Other systems don't have this problem. Dash needs to license a higher quality speech engine.

4) When you select a destination, it will give you 1-3 routing options to choose from. This process is a bit slower than I would like.

5) GPS re-acquisition after park/shutdown is slow.

6) No auto-zoom in when initial setting is zoomed way out or auto-zoom out when on highway to see more distance.

7) Noticed 2 cases which broke Dash. A) Driving past a destination in a straight line for several blocks made Dash to perform never-ending "recalculating" when a "u-turn" redirect should be used. B) When going to the LAX airport via route of I10W -> I101S -> I105W, on the ramp from I10 to I101, it first said to get on ramp on left to 101 which is correct but then it starts changing the name of 101 ramp to 105 ramp before correcting itself after I got on to 101.

*April 17* Was on highway CA-22 south/east bound and I missed the "beach st/blvd" exit. The unit did not start to recalculate until nearly 2 miles after the intended exit. Worst to come. Recalculation goes into an infinite loop/stalls and by now I was about 4 miles off the Beach exit and on a local street heading north on Brookhurst. The unit crashed and rebooted itself shortly after. During this whole time, the map shows me still on CA-22. It is unforgivable for the unit to have this problem. Having a GPS is supposed to save you from the huge problem of missing or taking the wrong exits when traveling on freeways. Due to this problem, I have downgraded my product rating from 4 to 3 stars.

8) In 3D mode, did not test this in 2D mode, vehicle position on map is approximately 2-3 seconds behind real-life for local traffic speed. For example, once you past lets say Garvey Ave in real-life, your virtual car on map will pass the virtual intersection about 2.5 seconds later. This is very annoying and they need to calibrate the firmware to compensate for this "lag". Further test show there is a ~100ft lag between car on screen and actual location, at least in the Los Angeles area. This is beginning to annoy me quite a bit. Other gps systems do not exhibit this problem.

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Overall:

Good new GPS with exciting future but the company must make fixes as soon as possible. If they do not fix the critical problems I have mentioned here, re-routing issue, night-time visibility, and speech quality, within the next 4-8 weeks, this product will become obsolete by more rounded competition such as Nuvi despite the ground-breaking traffic-view feature.

Not quite ready for prime-time
I wanted to love the Dash. I really did. I thought the concept was brilliant. I am changing jobs in a few months and will be using roads that aren't on the main traffic maps but have a LOT of traffic. I thought Dash would be perfect for my new commute.

I bragged it up to my coworkers before I even got it, which was a mistake. The unit is really still in development and in my opinion was not ready to be released to the public.

The biggest issue to me is the lack of gps functionality that I have grown accustomed to with my Garmin 2730 such as:
The close-up window that pops up when you are approaching your turn.
The ability to have spoken directions or not. (With Dash you mute all or nothing)
The ability to avoid toll roads and dirt roads.
The lack of a comprehensive POI database ON THE UNIT. If you can't connect to the network and you need to find something, you're probably screwed. There is not a whole lot on the unit.
On the Garmin, if you don't know the actual street address but you know where it is on the map you can still go there because you can go to a point on the map. On the Dash, I couldn't do that. It was a problem since the road my job is on doesn't have a name according to dash. I had to set up a google map link then send it to car. Way too much work when I should be able to tap a spot on the map and say "go here".

I recently took both my Dash and my Garmin side by side on the dashboard on 100 mile trip. The Dash took me on a strange and circuitous route that added about 15 minutes to the time enroute. It also tried to send me down a road that didn't exist. The Garmin tried to route me around traffic that didn't exist, but at least it used a real road to do it.

Some of the alternate routes the Dash would suggest were mind boggling. There are several routes I can take from home to work. Dash would come up with one, the same one I get from the Garmin, then suggest two other routes that basically had me drive 5 miles past my exit and then double back. Huh? Once it even gave me the option to make a complete circle around the beltway to come back. This stuff is fun to giggle at when you know where you're going but I couldn't trust it to go anywhere I didn't know. The Garmin doesn't always come up with the best routing but it's never been off by that much.

I sent back the Dash with great sadness. The traffic is great. But the GPS is poor. It's too much money to just use it as a traffic receiver. Maybe in a year or so I'll try it again.

Revolutionary in some areas, good in others.
I've owned a few different units over the years and it seems everyone does certain things very well and in other areas could use some improvement. This unit is no exception but a few of the things that it does VERY well are features that I love. I travel a lot of long distance traveling, 5-12 hours typically 2-3 times a month. I don't use my GPS as a media device nor for bluetooth so these functions are not important to me.

My history with GPS units include the Garmin 2610, Garmin Nuvi 680 and the Magellen Maestro 3250. I'll run through a few pros and cons of each unit.

Garmin 2610
Pros
-best routing preferences I've seen, you can rank major hwys, secondary roads and local roads on a scale between 1-10 for routing preferences.
-has ability to find POI's along your current route

Cons
-no traffic
-big and bulky
-$150 annual map upgrades (I believe this price has come down).
-long time to boot up
-lose reception and directions are gone

Garmin Nuvi 680
Pros
-small in size, packs a lot of features, easy to use
-quick to map and has ability to find POI's on your current route

Cons
-Limited routing preferences (no-uturn, avoid tolls, avoid highways and avoid unpaved roads) You can pick shortest or fastest or off road
-MSN connectivity not ready for prime time, I commute 30 miles to work and work right at the Lincoln tunnel. MSN does not pick up a signal until I am 2-3 miles outside of NYC, WAY too late to help me with traffic. The traffic is pretty useless as a result even within 10 miles of the largest city in the US.(returned it as a result after 9 months)
-even when MSN works you can only see regular fuel prices (I drive a diesel truck so it doesn't help me locate diesel fuel stations)
-can't use zip codes

Magellan Maestro 3250
Pros
-if you don't like the route you can click on a specific turn in the navigation to eliminate that portion of the route and the unit will recalculate the route with the exclusion (very cool feature)
-has 3 options Nuvi has for routing, plus use most highway
-when highway traveling you can search upcoming exits for food, fuel and lodging (very cool feature)

Cons
-NAVIGATION IS HORRIBLE!!!! I can't stress this enough, this unit CONSTANTLY tries to reroute you around ghost traffic. Traveling from the NC boarder to Morristown NJ, the unit read 16 hours with traffic for an 8 hour trip. At one point the unit tried to reroute us 45 miles south on I-95 while we were traveling north. When we arrived at the trafficed area there wasn't anything there and it was 11:30pm when it would be VERY unlikely a traffic issue would exisit. Traffic is very important to me and if for no other reason this is the worst unit I've ever owned(I bought it for traffic)

The Dash unit does a few things very well.
Pros-
-Traffic is amazing, even with the unit just being launched last week. I travel home during some serious traffic times and the unit does a fantastic job of keeping me up to the minute on traffic.
-Connectivity works very well, a world of difference from the Garmin
-Send to Car makes life very easy to send addresses and searches right to the unit
-Yahoo Search is also a fantastic feature, many many POI's on the other units I've owned are not still in busines Dash does a great job in this area and is second to none.
-Yahoo tells me the prices on each grade of fuel and diesel also!
-gives up to 3 routing choices

Cons
-when coming to a turn there isn't a split screen or any beep or any type of indication of when to turn.
-location of the car isn't 100 percent accurate like the other units
-no "along current route" searches you can search in your area or in a city but not along your current route
-does not offer routing preferences

Overall I think the yahoo and traffic capabilities are great features and make up for any minor shortcomings of the product as others have mentioned. The fact that dash has promised at least two upgrades a year at no additional cost, makes this unit with the 10 dollar a month service charge pay for itself. With that in mind, there are some improvements I'd like to see to make this unit the best in every category. No unit I've used is the best at everything, but Dash is so good at some of the things that are important to me, the things it doesn't do well are only an afterthought for improvement.