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| Dash Express Two-Way Internet-Connected Portable GPS Navigator | 
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| Brand: Dash
Category: CE
List Price: $299.99
Buy New: $249.00
You Save: $50.99 (17%)
New (2) from $249.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  141 reviews
Sales Rank: 602
Color: Black
Media: Electronics
Native Resolution: 480 x 272
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 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Boy did I want to like this GPS June 4, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
To say the routing is bad would be a vast understatement. For me in a semi-rural area, it proposed hour long routes circumnavigating the globe in the Dash's attempt to keep me on roads with route numbers. Instead of listening to the Dash I would drive the way I knew and watch the arrival estimate drop from an hour and a half to ten minutes.
My support queries to Dash went unanswered, and back she went this morning. Now I see Amazon has dropped the price by 25%. Yes, maybe the next software update will address the braindead routing algorithms, but I'm not betting my $400 on that promise.
I will go back to Garmin (my old Ique 3600 routes better than the Dash Express by far) and hopefully Dash will be around the next time I look to upgrade my GPS.
 Revolutionary but not the best GPS device. June 3, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is an awesome product in that you can find anything you're looking for right from your car with it's Yahoo search internet capability. The Send2Car feature along with live traffic information (supplemented with historic traffic data) are great to have as well. But it has some limitations as a serious GPS unit. It's bulk created a blind spot out my front windshield that concerned me on more than one occasion. The battery would go from fully charged to dead in about 2 days if I didn't use it. I also found it very aggravating to not have the ability to mark a spot so I could return to it. I thought I could live with these shortcomings, though. Unfortunately, what ultimately prompted me to return it is that it did not show my position in real time. I would pass a street I needed to turn onto before it would tell me I was at that intersection. Initially, this only seemed to be happening when I was using the 3D view, but after the folks at Dash pushed out their first traffic algorithm updates to all of their users, I found that even the 2D view could not be counted on to show your actual position if you were moving at any speed over 10 MPH. Dash was promising a performance-enhancing update soon, but I did not want to risk getting stuck with a GPS that consistently lagged behind where I was while driving. One last bit of advice to the folks at Dash: add Canada and northern Mexico to your base maps. I haven't been to Canada in 14 years. When I got the Dash GPS, my wife suddenly wanted to go to Niagara Falls and Montreal. For her, it instilled confidence in our ability to travel to unknown places and back again. At the moment I do not have a GPS unit, so I am keeping my eye on Dash to see what they do to address the hiccups of their first product. For their sake, the 2nd generation iPhone better not have GPS capability when it is rolled out later in June, or Dash will have to do some serious price cutting.
DASH GPS May 28, 2008
4 out of 9 found this review helpful
I have owned this item about one month. In that time the DASH has exhibited a weaker battery re holding a charge than expected. DASH customer service alibis this by saying that the device should always be on charge either in my vehicle or plugged into a 110
outlet. This seems short sighted. In an emergency where it becomes necessary to leave the vehicle to seek help, a lithium-ion battery with a couple hours (minimum) service life without a charge would be a great asset to a stranded motorist.
Secondly, recently the device "froze" in the off setting in spite of being plugged in to my vehicle's cig lighter socket. Nothing was wrong with my electrical system nor with the connection to the DASH. At home later and with the device plugged into a 110 outlet,it finally came back while I was pressing the on/off switch. Again, customer service seemed aware of this because they emailed me back suggesting I do
exactly what I did to respond to "device frozen".
For a $400 machine I find this device a bit wanting.
Valiant first attempt but comes up short May 25, 2008
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
I've been using GPS navigation systems in my car for about 5 years. Before the Dash, I was using a TomTom Go 300.
Pros:
* Online search by Yahoo! is nice. TomTom's database is sparse and searching it is painful.
* It works pretty well as a basic GPS navigation system - it will get you from point A to point B via a reasonably efficient route.
Cons:
* The traffic data is totally bogus. Roads are routinely yellow or red when there's no one on them. Dash probably has a chicken and egg problem here, in that there aren't enough Dash devices out there to generate accurate traffic data. But having the data be wrong is worse than not having it at all. And it is, in my experience, very often wrong. You are better off looking at Google maps traffic.
* The route selection algorithm is slow, taking 20-30 seconds to plan your routes.
* There are times when you just want to take a route, not see 3 choices, and there's no way to do that. This is easily fixed.
* The device consistently interferes with at least one my FM radio stations.
* It lacks some of the advanced features of the TomTom, such as:
- alternative routes
- ability to customize what you can see on the screen (e.g., arrival time, current time, speed)
* The hardware is large and clunky. Some of the marketing shots make it seem misleadingly slim. The mounting arm is a marvel of engineering, and it needs to be to support this thing.
If this device had come out 3 or 4 years ago you might say, "Wow." But there's a state of the art in GPS navigation systems, and the Dash Express comes up significantly short of that. Moreover, the one area where it is differentiated, online traffic, simply doesn't work.
A work in progress May 23, 2008
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
I had great hopes for this GPS. It has turned out to be more of a disappointment, especially if you have used Garmin products.
It is slow to latch onto a satellite signal, even when you don't move. Out of curiosity, I have timed it on several occasions. It has taken up to 17 minutes under clear skies to find a signal. With the car moving, it has taken as long as 30 minutes. Sometimes it needs only a couple of minutes.
If you look at the FAQ sections of the web site, you will find one that refers to rebooting the GPS. I never had to reboot a Garmin product. I have to reboot the Dash at least once a day. Generally, if you don't get a satellite signal within about 5 minutes, resetting it will get it to capture the signal faster. The rebooting process itself takes about 3-4 minutes, an eternity if you need the thing to help you find your way in moving traffic. Sometimes it freezes spontaneously, but I have not been able to discern a pattern as to why.
After you reset the machine, and you are moving, the car icon sometimes shows up on the left side of the rode instead of in its center, and the car image wobbles. After a mile or so, the car centers itself on the road you are following. This is more annoying than interesting.
The automatic routing is boneheaded. I have compared it side to side with a Garmin Nuvi 750 and a C330, and the Dash consistently finds routes that are at least 4-5 miles longer than they need to be. On a longer road trip it calculated a route that was 12 miles longer! I live near a state line, and, to route me home, routinely takes me into the next state and then swing back. It also has mapping errors. There is a major highway that has had a left turn for at least 15 years, and the Dash told me to make a right turn onto it and then make a U turn as soon as feasible. It also lacks a useful Garmin feature, routing by shortest time or by shortest distance.
Another missing feature is a screen that shows you your current average speed, elapsed time, etc.
Form some reason, the 2D maps are missing a lot of streets, but the 3D views don't, even at higher magnification. This is too bad, since sometimes you need a traditional map view to better orient yourself.
On the plus side, the notification feature does work well, as does the send to car from the website item. It did keep from from a traffic jam, once, hence the 2 stars instead of one. However, the device is so unreliable I don't think it is worth paying the subscription price for what is essentially a cell phone with a large screen that can't transmit your voice. By the by, the pronounciation of some streets by the Dash is hilarious, and wrong.
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