|
| Dash Express Two-Way Internet-Connected Portable GPS Navigator | 
 enlarge
| Brand: Dash
Category: CE
List Price: $299.99
Buy New: $289.99
You Save: $10.00 (3%)
New (2) Used (3) from $209.84
Avg. Customer Rating:  124 reviews
Sales Rank: 891
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 24 hours
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Suffers First Generation Flaws June 6, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I use my GPS for two different things. Most important is in city searches when I am looking for someplace around town. Second, I use it for long road trips to get from here to some far off location and back.
The Dash is really good for short around town use and to locate things. It has the best search features of any of the four or five different devices I have used and almost never frustrates me. It is perfect for finding something locally that may be obscure like a plumbing supply place or a doctor's office.
On long trips in unfamiliar territory, the device is nearly useless. There are errors in the map database I find regularly. It routes me around toll roads, and as I live in Florida where the turnpike is often the fastest and most direct route, it is a huge source of frustration. I complained to DASH and got no response. It crashes or updates regularly and if you are driving during the period of an update, it becomes non-responsive. Further, when I missed an exit in St. Louis, it decided I wanted to take the road I was on and re-routed me home in a way that was 280 miles longer.
Finally, the traffic information is mixed. I usually seem to find out about a traffic problem when I am stuck in it. I really hoped this would be useful, but in practice, so far it has not been.
In summary, if you are someone that does deliveries or service calls to houses, this thing is great. If you take road trips it stinks. The traffic so far is not that helpful.
 A 2002 Garmin Street Pilot III Gave Me Better Directions June 5, 2008
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
This GPS is ground breaking. It offers features that no one else offers right now. That being said, I set my destination for work (from home). It was 6:30 pm. In rush-hour traffic, it normally takes me 35 to 38 minutes on local roads for the 15 mile commute. The Dash express wanted to take me on the expressway, adding over 5 miles to the trip and turning a 38 minute commute into an hour and 10 minute commute. This route to work is the same route I've gone since 2002 when I had Garmin Street Pilot III Deluxe. Unlike the Dash, both the Garmin Street Pilot III Deluxe and the Garmin C330 GPS models gave me perfect, timely routes. Also, I logged into the Dash forum, a site for owners only. Apparently the Dash avoids local roads like the plague. For the most part all the routes involve expressways, even if it adds extra time to the trip.
Also this thing is much bigger than it looks. In my Saab convertible, the suction cup holder and the GPS blocked out a huge amount of my windshield view. The Dash makes the 2002 Street Pilot III look small in comparison.
The traffic info is neat, but you can't really do anything with it because the routing system is so flawed. I'm returning the Dash Express.
 Best GPS available! June 4, 2008
8 out of 14 found this review helpful
When I received the dash unit, I was a little upset because I already had a Garmin GPS that I really liked. Well, like any techy, I set up both to compare them in my typical day to day, the dash is one of the fastest gps units I've ever seen. If I miss a turn, it will reroute before the next block, unlike my Garmin, which was rerouting even after I had made the dash turn. For about a month, I've been using solely the dash unit. The send2car is one of the most innovative features I've seen in a real long time, which is great. The support is phenomenal with the company, but with the dash you also are in the dash community, internet forums are filled with just dash users helping other users. You can also add applications to the device, such as weatherbug or trapster, which tells you when and where a police speed trap is located. This device is innovative and affordable, a bargain when you consider the exceptional customer service, as well as the growing user base. Highly recommended
 Boy did I want to like this GPS June 4, 2008
4 out of 7 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
4 out of 7 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.
|
|
|
Copyright
©
2006 Adminpal LLC | |
