Dash is dead.

Dash the company basically died about a year ago. They stopped making new devices and fired all the support staff. Apparently they’re focusing on trying to sell the always connected technology to other gps vendors. My Dash Express unit died a couple months ago. It won’t boot anymore, no matter what I’ve tried. It starts to boot and gets stuck, then reboots. My data subscription is over and obviously I won’t be renewing it.

I’ve been trying various gps apps on the iPhone to replace the Dash and the one I like so far is waze.

It’s a free crowdsourced navigation app. It’s easy to use and, hopefully, anyway, gets better the more you and other people us it. As you can see from the screenshot, it looks like most any gps navigation application but there are some differences. The blue car on the pink line is you. The pink line is your route. There are three other wazers on the map, a green one, a pink one and a gray one. There are also two incident reports, a police one and one that looks like a general warning. If you click on one of the incidents, it will give you details about it.

It’s also got a built in game mode where you get points for driving on roads no other waze user has driven on. On the waze map, any roads or section of road which no waze user has driven on have dots on them. When you drive on these roads your car on the waze map turns into a pacman-car hybrid and gobbles up dots. You get points for the dots and a global ranking system lets you know how you’re doing in relation to others. Last time I used it I was in something like 2400th place.

You can also see other waze users on your map and it lets you set a mood which changes your icon on the map. You can report slow traffic, police speed traps, construction, etc. to let other wazers know about it. Hopefully at some point they will add live traffic from source other than waze users.

waze is fun, but routing needs to get quicker and more accurate. If their algorithms are good, the more you drive, the better routing should get. If you’ve got an iPhone, Android phone or Windows Mobile phone, you should give it a try.