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| Brand: Dash
Category: CE
List Price: $299.99
Buy New: $299.00
You Save: $0.99
New (2) Used (2) from $248.99
Rating:  155 reviews
Sales Rank: 1847
Color: Black
Media: Electronics
Native Resolution: 480 x 272
Includes MP3 Player: 0
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 2.8 x 4.8 x 4.1
MPN: 99-1000-001
Model: 99-1000-001
UPC: 892437002012
EAN: 0892437002012
ASIN: B0014CIBWC
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 116-120 of 155
 Unsatisfied customer April 3, 2008
Kathi Maitake
3 out of 28 found this review helpful
There were too many add on costs that I was unaware of. Should have read the other reviews here on Amazon before impulse buying. Luckily A has an easy return policy. I'm going to check out other brands at a bricks and mortor store and find one that better suits my needs. I do alot of city driving. This one was a little too large.
Unfortunately DASH is not quite ready for "Prime Time" April 3, 2008
ZAPMAN (Alabama)
29 out of 36 found this review helpful
I love GPS technology and have four GPS units including the original "Never Lost" based system that required lots of wring and vehicle mounting. (The portable version weighed five pounds).
I just purchased my DASH unit on Monday and like it, but unfortunately do not "love" it. The bottom line is that this unit is not quite ready for "prime time". Yes it has some cutting edge features. However it also lacks features that have been on other models for many years.
First of all let me address the issue of the service fee. Most all of us (especially me) hate monthly or annual service fees. However it is important to note that it is cheaper to own than comparable units from other vendors. Most charge $100-$200 for an annual map updates (if they even get around to providing one). Owners of some models have not had any options to update their units. DASH has committed to providing two updates per years. In addition they will also seamlessly provide firmware updates. This is a huge benefit and easily outweighs the monthly subscription fee.
Pros:
1. Ability to send addresses to your unit via computer within seconds is a great feature and truly a time saver.
2. You can also send address information to a friend's DASH unit.
3. The ability to find gas stations and display prices as well as find movie theaters and display movie times is a great feature.
4. I have also set up custom searches from MY Dash and transmitted them to my DASH unit.
5. The traffic feature is a nice, however has not been of much use in my first few days of use. I do think it is a terrific use of technology and will increase in benefit as there are more DASH units in the field.
6. Top notch customer service. I have communicated with DASH support both by phone and email and have been impressed by their knowledge and responsiveness. Other GPS companies (i.e. Magellan should be paying attention).
CONS:
1. No tone/chime just prior to the time a driver should implement a procedure similar to the Magellan?
The tone/chime is very reassuring and provides the necessary warning just prior to implementing a maneuver. With the DASH I have to spend too much time looking at the display to make sure I do not miss a maneuver. This negates much of the safety benefit of having a GPS unit in your vehicle.
With the DASH it is too easy to miss a turn.
2. Lack of an automatic split screen with a zoom (also similar to the Magellan) as the next maneuver approaches?
This is another great feature to insure a driver does not miss a maneuver. Plus the zoomed screen only requires a slight glance instead of having to stare at the smaller graphic on the DASH unit.
3. It does not display the name of the "CURRENT" street/road in addition to displaying the upcoming street/road?
I realize screen space in limited. But there is a real comfort in knowing you are on the correct street and its name. Other units have this feature.
4. As stated in a previous review the map graphics on the DASH are not up to a par of those from Magellan and Garmin. One reviewer remarked it looked as though they were designed by a high school graphics class. That may be an insult to high school students as I think they may have been able to do a better job. Hopefully this will be addressed by DASH in a future update.
Any of my four other GPS units (even those with smaller screens) do a much better job of allowing me to glance at a screen to determine my location and upcoming maneuvers.
5. Lack of choices to include (exclude) interstates, toll roads, etc. This was also noted in the USA Today review along with issues of the unit freezing and being slow to pick up the satellites. Their reviewer gave it 2 out of 4 stars).
I believe the DASH offers several big improvements in GPS technology. The DASH is an innovative unit and will have other companies scrambling. However like most any newly released product it does need to tweaking to live up to the "hype" and expectations of customers. Hopefully the graphics and other issues will be addressed in an upcoming firmware update.
Unfortunately DASH responded to an email yesterday and indicated there are no immediate plans to address these issues. This makes it likely I will be returning my DASH unit.
Hopefully in the future they will have a more complete package.
 Good product but can be much better..... April 3, 2008
Xing Li (Los Angeles, USA)
174 out of 186 found this review helpful
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.
GOOD BUT STILL NEEDS WORK April 3, 2008
Roy Taylor (Baltimore MD)
15 out of 18 found this review helpful
OK: I received mine on April 2nd and after checking it out I will say DASH, you forgot some of the basic functions that I am sure you can fix with a software update.
1. There is no way in SETTINGS to change the font size for street names.
The Garmin that I use I can change it from small,med or large as
well as make it light or darker. That would be a big help so one
does not have to strain to read the street names.
2. In map mode (not go to mode), it would be nice to have a banner on the top of the map to let you know what streets you are comming up on.
Yes the Garmin that I have does that.
3. Do you know that the map does not show (or at least mine does not show) mile markes or exit numbers for intersate roads. You cannot even tell the unit to take you to an exit. one must pick a street close by and wing it.
4. The unit does not like small streets, nor some big ones. Its a hit and miss. Some major roads in downtown Baltimore when doing a search will not come up. How about allowing the local search to include the range of the map that one has setup in the unit? So if you are looking within the confines of that range of the map you have chosen, it mite make things easer.
5. I like the SENT TO CAR feature. I can see where company's could use your unit to dipatch their people and it would make it easer for them to get where they need to be. But be aware, sometimes it fast to receieve the message and sometimes it take up to 5 min.
6. The yahoo search engine so far has worked well. It has given me Mall's, Food, Gas & Prices ect. So much info so far that I have not had a chance to explore everthing.
7. The traffic intell does perform very well as advertised.
8. I have noticed that if one wants to go to a give address, the unit will get you there but not always the best way. It does have some issues to fix but again, it a programming thing.
9. I will still contine to use the DASH in hopes that they are able to fix and make better.
DAY 1, First Impressions - Austin TX April 3, 2008
LH
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
I saw a news story about the Dash Express and was very intrigued from the get-go. I own a late model vehicle with an integrated GPS with which I was, and still am, less than satisfied not only from its performance on its own merit, but also by comparison to another integrated GPS system in another late model vehicle I own which performs much, much better. I Google'd Dash, visited their web-site, and read the reviews here on Amazon. I decided I had to try it and ordered away. I received the unit today, tried out the features online at Dash's web-site, and gave the unit a spin in the car. For those who are curious, the version information of my Dash is:
S/W version: 2.0.1.457
Operating System Version: 2.0.1.26
Map Data: 3.0.1.121
Setup was fairly easy and the interface very intuitive. Online at Dash's web-site I ran into a bug and then, unrelated to that one, ran into a case where the Dash unit itself wasn't processing a few addresses it received from the web-site correctly. I reported these to Dash via their web-site. They weren't too major (I'll spare the details for now) and ultimately I was able to work around or resolve them via a full Dash power-cycle/reboot.
I then gave the unit a try in the car. The first glaring difference from the Dash and my other integrated units is the verbal prompting. It was somewhat startling in comparison to the natural voices on my integrated (DVD-based) GPS's. The Dash is somewhat of a throwback. It's very computerized-sounding, digitally-created audio. It was clear, but it's not nearly as pleasant sounding as the digitally-recorded audio on DVD-based GPS's. I also noted in the 3D-view of the Dash that the map display appeared to lag quite a bit behind the actual car's position despite the fact that I was only driving between 30 and 35mph. The 2D-view doesn't appear to lag nearly as much, though there is a more noticeable delay to "complete a turn" than on my integrated GPS's. And, speaking of delay, the time for Dash to calculate routes takes a bit longer than my integrated ones. To be clear, this is a one-for-one comparison, too, because one of my integrated GPSs *also* calculates up to three different routes too, but it's definitely quicker than the Dash. I was relieved to find that when I made a stop for an errand during my route, turned off the unit, and turned it back on that the Dash resumed the trip just fine. The route the Dash calculated was well-chosen without any oddities.
The Dash is not a small unit and leaving it exposed in your vehicle just screams, BREAK IN AND STEAL ME. This along with a dangling power cord when exceeding Dash's purported 2-hr battery limit is another drawback by comparison to an integrated GPS. Normally, I'd only use a GPS on occasion in my town and always for out-of-town car trips. However, with the Dash you'll want to use it all the time even when you know where you're going to enjoy the traffic-reporting features. So, this means of course one may very likely be playing the hide-the-Dash-or-take-it-with-you game all the time.
The two-way communication features the Dash provides truly represent a huge revolutionary jump in GPS functionality. The live traffic features, ability to do online searches which yield not only addresses but even data like gas prices, movies and their times, download addresses from the web (and Outlook), get updated maps/software, etc. make this a really, really exciting product. I think if they partner with some car manufacturers and get this directly integrated into vehicles (where it could also do nice things like mute the stereo automatically) would be incredible. Also (or alternatively), if they can shrink the Dash to become more portable, then that would be a big win enabling the use in another vehicle.
In summary, the awesome features of the Dash are offset somewhat by, at present, a couple bugs and inconveniences, the latter especially when compared to an integrated unit, but that would apply to other portable units as well -- not just the Dash. I will remain optimistic that Dash will fix some of the problems and with its ability to update wirelessly, the installation of the fixes should (hopefully) be a breeze.
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UPDATE 4/9/2008
Impressions after one week
After one week with the Dash, here are my findings and impressions:
PROS
1. Thus far I'm happy with the routing and re-routing. When I've "disobeyed" the unit taking an alternate route, it very quickly deduced and calculated the new route. I have not run into the issue where others have reported being told to make a U-turn or "forced back" to a major road. That said, my experience so far has been limited to driving only around Austin TX.
2. Screen appears to be very viewable even in direct sunlight. Other units I have used didn't perform as well.
3. The ability to perform searches, send addresses to car, etc., as I've made reference in a previous review (after one day) is awesome.
4. I envy those reviewers who seem to live in areas with many more Dash owners (Dashers?). I almost never see solid lines indicating live-traffic reporting here in Austin. Most of the traffic indication is apparently from historic data because I've sped through areas marked yellow and even red. I assume this will improve with time.
CONS
1. I have run into a couple bugs. On one occasion I was unable to either save or clear addresses sent to the car. I have repeatedly had the Dash state that I have "new saved searches" upon startup, when in fact I haven't added any. Another bug, with which the Dash folks are familiar according to the FAQ and will be fixing, that I've run into is when I've reached my destination but the Dash unit doesn't stop routing. I've also experienced a case where I had to press the power-button a couple times before the unit started up. Maybe it's just my Dash?
2. Poor battery life. One of the reason they explain the large size is for greater battery life. It seems even worse than the estimated max (2 hours). I now plug in the unit on a daily basis even when it's just a day of only a couple short jaunts around town.
3. Painfully slow GPS sync-up. As others have reported, "Searching GPS" seems to take a very long time. It's definitely much, much longer than any other GPS I've used.
4. Odd and mysterious power-states. I still haven't figured this one out entirely. Sometimes, the Dash will power-up quickly (though, again take awhile to find a GPS satellite), but other times it seems to "cold start" taking much longer to boot up. The shutdown, while not a hindrance in any way, oddly seems to take awhile too sometimes with the led light blinking for quite awhile after the removal of power.
5. I wish the buttons (volume, menu, and power) weren't so sensitive.
WANTS
I trust that software updates will resolve lots of issues and the bugs I've run into. Other things I'd like to see are auto-zooming. I believe a couple other reviewers lamented its notable absence.
For the next generation, I'd really love to see them add some kind of Bluetooth connectivity that would mute the car stereo when it gives directions.
Finally, I'll share the opinion that I don't think the subscription service fee is bad at all. Considering that it gives updated maps, software updates and of course the connectivity for getting live traffic data, sending addresses and doing searches, I feel it's very reasonable. It's a LOT less expensive per year than having to purchase just the map updates on my other integrated GPS's.
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