I’ve had the Dash Express for 3 weeks now and I figure it’s time to give a little review of it.
First, the positives.
- Send2Car. Search on the web and find the address of somewhere you want to go, highlight it and Send2Car. Bam, it shows up on your GPS. No writing addresses down on a piece of paper and having to type it into the GPS. There is also a Firefox plugin, but it doesn’t yet work with Firefox 3 beta 5 that I run.
- Search for gas prices. With the price of gas seemingly going up every day, it’s great to be able to find the lowest price in the area.
- Traffic rerouting. It’s only happened once so far, but the Dash Express saw bad traffic in front of me and offered to reroute. Cool!
- Customizability. You can add RSS feeds to it for just about anything. I’ve got the weather and Austin’s best restaurants currently. You can create your own or Dash has some. I’m sure more even cooler ones will be available in the future.
- Upgradability. Map updates are included in the service. Dash is actively adding features and fixing bugs. Those are free too. Those are extra cost on most GPS systems.
Now the negatives.
- It’s had issues 3 or 4 times with turning on when it gets power. Normally it comes right on when I start my car, but a few times I had to manually power cycle it.
- The map in 3D mode lags a little bit. Dash says they’re working on improving speed.
- I haven’t experienced it yet, but apparently there are issues with long distance routing. Again, they’re working on it.
Overall, I’m quite happy with it. There seem to be a fairly large number of people on the Dash forums that are unhappy and thinking about returning their unit. But most of them are saying things like “I’ll check it out again in 6 months to see if it’s more polished and suits my needs better.” Almost nobody is completely unhappy or disappointed. I’m not sure what they expected from a company that’s not just new to making GPS units, but is an entirely new company. They’re not just making the Dash Express, they’re also building up their infrastructure and support and figuring out how they handle things and grow. I’m satisfied with it now and I believe that it will continue to get even better. Everything I’ve seen from them indicates they are in it for the long haul.
Would I recommend you buy one? Depends. If you’re patient and willing to ride it out while it matures, then yes. If you insist on it working right 100% of the time, you should either wait for Dash to become more polished or buy a Garmin or something.