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.

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.

I just realized it’s April Fool’s Day. That explains the wacky stories I’ve been seeing online.