Dash Navigation is applying 21st-centry technology to solve a problem as old as driving itself: traffic. While other GPS devices all receive the same incomplete and outdated traffic updates via FM or MSN-Direct, Dash is creating its own traffic network using multiple sources, including live data from actual Dash owners. The results are impressive, and Dash actually manages to produce traffic data that is noticeably better than anyone else's.

Unfortunately, Dash Express is so singularly focused on traffic, that the rest of this GPS still feels rough around the edges, and its appeal will likely be limited to serious commuters and all but the most hardcore early adopters.

Dash Express sells of $299 and requires a monthly service plan ($9.99 - $13.00 per month, depending on how long a contract you're willing to commit to).

Physical

The first time you see this GPS you will immediately be struck by the size. This isn’t a “slip into your shirt pocket” type GPS. You won’t be using this GPS to walk around the downtown of a big city. The Express measures 4.8 inches wide, 4.1 inches tall, and 2.8 inches in depth, and creates a device just under one pound in weight. Think of it as the size of a softball rather than the ubiquitous deck of cards comparison.

The 4.3 inch touch screen is very bright, and colors don’t wash out at all when viewed from very high or very wide angles. The touch screen is perfectly sensitive (you don’t have to tap too hard) and it was very precise. There is also a screen alignment function should it come out of sync.

Typical day/night modes are included. The night mode even shows the headlights of the car icon illuminating part of the road ahead of you… a nice bit of eye candy.  The day and night modes can be automatically changed based on sunrise and sunset. In addition, the brightness setting can automatically change based on the ambient light conditions.

Routing to an Address

If you know the physical address you are going to, the Dash Express works much like other GPS devices. From the Menu, select ‘choose a destination’ -> ‘type an address’ -> and then select the stae (if different), city, house number, and street name.

For those of you who might have experienced a few quirks or restrictions on other GPS models, the Dash Express seems to get it right. For example you can enter letters and dashes into the street numbers (yes, they do exist occasionally). It can recognize states spelled out by name or by their abbreviation. Finally, the single keyboard layout is QWERTY.

One feature we did miss though was being able to smartly account for spelling mistakes. It doesn’t handle spelling errors at all.

After selecting an address the GPS will show you the address it matched to, as well as the direction and straight line distance from your current location. You can choose to view a map of the location, save it as a favorite, save it to your address book, or create routes to that location.

“Route(s)?” You ask? Yes. In my mind one of the most brilliant things about the Dash Express is that if there is more than one reasonable route to the location, it will show up to three routes to pick from. People argue with each other about the “best” route, and people argue with their GPS about the “best” route. You will find yourself arguing with the Dash Express less because it is just more easy going than other models. However, that is not to say that the Dash is prefect at routing by any means. You will see a few examples of this later in the article.

For those of you wanting to squeeze every dollar out of your gas tank, this feature can be a help with the wallet too. One drive I recently took presented me with two routes. One was an estimated 3:57 and 249 miles. The second was two minutes longer estimating 3:59, but only 215 miles. The shorter distance route that will take me two minutes longer will save me lots of fuel to the 34 miles it shaves off and the lower speeds I’ll be traveling.

Yet another reason to love this feature is that despite my stubborn brain trying to convince me otherwise, the Dash Express often came up with creative (and indeed faster!) ways to get to my destination than I would have come up with myself.

Each route option is presented with an estimated travel time based on current and estimated traffic conditions, as well as the route distance. Each route is drawn on the map for you to see and toggle between.

If you want to pan in and zoom around the map viewing the route preview, the map updates are fairly slow when compared to other devices. The map zooms in and you sometimes wait several seconds before the map is redrawn.

Once you’ve picked a route (sometimes there are three, sometimes two, and sometimes it only offers one) you tap Go and navigate on your way.

Connected Search

This is where the Dash Express starts to show what it was really designed for. Above I mentioned how I dislike when the Food or Restaurant category isn’t broken down into sub-categories. Here is how the Dash alleviates what would otherwise be a setback…. Connected Search.

From the Menu, select ’search (connected)’. From this menu I type in “japanese” as I’m in the mood for sushi. I click ’search’ -> ‘nearby’. My search is sent out wirelessly from the GPS to Yahoo, Yahoo gathers up the search results, and sends them back to the GPS. What is even better is that the results are sorted by RELEVANCE rather than just distance or alphabetically through the Yahoo search engine.

Don’t want the relevance sort? That is okay too. You can pick to sort by distance, alphabetically, or by RATING.

This works with most anything. A search for “coffee” showed listings for cafes, diners, and retail stores that sell coffee. A search for “iPhone” showed all of the local AT&T locations. Searching for “iPod” gave me some nearby Circuit City locations. To my amusement a search for “Garmin” came back with “No matches found on Yahoo Local”. I’m sure that was unintentional. 

Once in awhile the searches just don’t make too much sense. Wanting to know just how far I could push the limits, I searched for “shovel” and got results for a Tae Kwon Do school, a police station, and an apartment complex. A more appropriate search for “hardware” brought up much more appropriate locations.

It would be great if in addition to the rating, we could read reviews. I suspect that is something that will come in future versions of the software.

There were a few times when this groovy internet hookup with nearly infinite POIs let us down, however. The built in POI databases on most GPS devices are pretty good at determining the “proper” location of a POI versus perhaps their mailing address. The connected search wasn’t always as considerate.

For example when we asked it to take us to a nearby ski resort, the “connected search” directed us to their corporate offices, about 10 miles from the actual ski area. Just a small “gotcha” to watch out for.

Traffic: “TruTraffic”

Complimenting the “connected search” aspects of the Dash Express, the Traffic services are the second revolutionary feature of the Dash Express. Other GPS devices have live traffic reporting… but not like Dash does. Similar to other traffic services, Dash uses data from INRIX to power its traffic service. Live traffic reports from fleet companies and road sensors are delivered to your GPS in order to paint a picture of traffic on the road ahead.

But Dash takes this one step further. YOU become part of the data. If you get stuck in traffic on a particular road at 6:15 pm on a Friday evening and that data becomes part of the profile Dash keeps for that segment of road. Over time and with more data, the traffic profiles and the traffic prediction models improve. The next week on a Friday evening at 6:15 on that same stretch of road might yield the same traffic, and other drivers can be warned about it.

A fun task is to plan a route to a nearby city on your Dash. Leave it on the screen where it presents route options for you. Watch throughout the day as the estimated travel time changes based on current and/or predicted traffic levels.

While not deliberate, I discovered just how interesting and accurate that data can become. I was driving down a nearby road that is littered with traffic lights during my review test of the Dash Express. I wanted to go back and repeat a certain stretch of road again as I had missed seeing something on the display. I looped back around by way of a parallel street, and then started driving up the road again, about a mile behind where I had previously traveled minutes ago.

Where there had previously been no traffic information, there was now a solid green line over the road. Hey, those are my tracks! That is my data! It was a total eureka moment. But to further my amazement, you could even see which traffic lights I caught on green and which I caught on red. Where I had “missed” the green light you could see a couple hundred feet of road where the traffic/speed profile showed a solid red line.

Now by itself that isn’t terribly interesting… I mean to someone else driving behind me the fact that I missed that light doesn’t really mean they will miss it too. But just noticing how fast the Dash network reacted to the data– and the accuracy of that data– and then imagining how interesting it will be with much MORE data… that really makes me start to believe in this type of traffic system and the advantages over a more typical traffic model.
Traffic Display

Traffic on the map is displayed in green, yellow, orange, and red colors depending upon the current traffic flow. This is fairly standard although many other devices only show three different levels.

If the colored traffic lines are dashed, that means the data is coming from a third party. This data can be either estimated based on historical traffic patters (what the traffic is like on that day of week and that time historically) or based on current conditions. The current conditions come from fleet companies, road sensors, etc.

When the traffic data on the map is in a solid line, this is data being augmented from other drivers in the Dash network. Either another driver with a Dash device just recently drove that road segment, or it is historical traffic data that Dash themselves have constructed for the road segment, day of week, and time of day.

If you are driving towards your destination and the traffic conditions changed against your favor, a male voice will announce that the traffic conditions have changed. (The regular navigation voice is female.) A yellow box will appear on the GPS showing the estimated time of the delay.

This makes the Dash Express like a good wine— it will get better with age as they gain more customers and more historical traffic data. The system also tries to be smart about the traffic alerts and estimates it provides. If it knows there is a ten minute delay on your route right now that is 80 miles ahead, and it thinks that delay will likely be gone by the time you get there– Dash will try to be smart and won’t accidentally sound the alarm. Likewise if there are no CURRENT delays on your route but based on historical traffic patterns Dash thinks there will be a delay by the time you get there– the Dash network is designed to take that into account as well. While we’ve spent 500 miles with the Dash it hasn’t been quite enough time to fully grasp just how much better this will be over traditional traffic systems, but it looks real good.

With all of this good historical traffic data built into the device, I would like the ability to plan a route using a starting time of a date/time in the future. For example if I’m headed into Boston tomorrow morning for a meeting, I’d like to know how long it might take me if I leave at 8:00 am. Or I might like to know what time I SHOULD leave if I need to get there by 9:30 am. In addition, when viewing the summary of routes it might be nice to know how much of a delay is accounted for in each of the routes. It shows what the total estimated time is for each route, including the delay, but it doesn’t break out what the amount of the delay is.
Following a Route

We’ve talked about how the two most important pieces of information you need from a GPS to navigate are a distance to turn field and a “next turn” graphic or intersection icon. Dash delivers these two pieces of information well. In the top left corner of the display an intersection icon appears showing the type of intersection and the path you need to follow. Next to that the distance to that maneuver, followed by the name of the next street. This is well executed.

On the other hand, the more subtle aspects of following a route can be difficult at times on the Dash Express. The colors of the display are fairly dull. Dash says they do this on purpose so that the traffic information (displayed in red, green, orange, and yellow) will “pop” more and stand out from the rest of the map. It took some time getting used to following the highlighted path.

Something else that stood out was the lack of significant auto zooming as you approached intersections. While navigating complex, unfamiliar intersections I found myself spending much more time trying to view the map than I would with other GPS devices. Without an auto-zoom at intersections, many medians and tight streets were difficult to read on the display making me unsure of the proper road to take. I hope that an auto-zoom function is near to the top of the list of Dash’s Enhancement To-do List as navigating in unfamiliar areas can sometimes be more challenging than it needs to be.

I also didn’t like that one way streets are not labeled as such on the map. The underlying maps obviously know about one way streets, however they were not labeled on the map.

Dash is quick to point out that their target audience is people who are hard-core commuters. Thus, many people in their target audience will know where they are going most of the time and be using the Express to provide them with vital traffic information about their route.

At one point I was in a friend’s driveway, no more than 30 feet from the road (which was mapped), and the GPS just couldn’t build a route to any location I would give it. It kept saying ‘No Routes Found to destination’. The weird thing was that about 10 minutes later it started to build routes again. But then 10 minutes later it was back to “no routes found”.

The only hypothesis I could come up with was that as the GPS adjusted our position something was happening that was preventing it from figuring out where to start from. However, other times when we asked it to plan routes from locations that were significantly further from the nearest mapped street it worked fine. Hopefully this was just an isolated incident and across 500+ miles of testing we only saw it that one time.

Conclusion 

Dash Express is a unique product that is changing the value proposition of connected GPS navigation in the already-crowded GPS market. Unlike other navigators that download traffic incident or flow information from road sensors installed throughout the United States, Dash is building its own network of connected drivers. Each Dash Express driver becomes a live traffic probe, anonymously sending traffic information back to Dash so it can be relayed to other drivers in the area.  Essentially Dash Express is a connected mobile computer, able to receive software updates, traffic updates, and other enhancements seamlessly over-the-air.

Historical traffic data fills in the gaps for roads without live data, creating a remarkably accurate picture of current road conditions. During my testing, I was highly impressed with the quality of Dash's traffic information, even in rural areas where I was very likely the only Dash driver for miles. Dash is also the first GPS device to report surface road traffic conditions as well as highways.

There's simply no denying that Dash has developed the most accurate and complete traffic information available on any GPS today. That's the good news. The bad news is that Dash Express is so singularly focused on traffic that it falls short in many of the more basic areas. Dash's menu system can be confusing, and the device exhibits almost none of the refinement and polish of a Garmin, Magellan, or TomTom GPS. 

The map screen does a good job displaying traffic conditions, but it can be difficult to see upcoming turn maneuvers or the route you're supposed to follow.  Panning and zooming the map is very slow, as is route calculation.  I also lamented the frustrating situation of seeing red traffic conditions ahead, but having no way to exclude a specific road or segment from the route.

Then there's the size issue: Dash Express is bulkier and heavier than any other GPS around. Granted, Dash has Wi-Fi and GPRS connectivity, but so does the iPhone, and at a fraction of the size and weight. I'm not sure why Dash didn't put the Wi-Fi and GPRS receivers into the (already bulky) windshield mount instead of the GPS, but the sheer size and weight of Dash Express may turn some consumers off.

Priced at $299, Dash's monthly subscription service, required for traffic updates and Internet-connected search, costs $13 for month-to-month service,  $10.99 per month for a 1-year contract, or $9.99 per month for a 2-year commitment.   The device ships with three months of service included for free. Dash Express can still be used without an active subscription, but you'll lose traffic updates and connected Yahoo search. Without an active connection, Dash Express has a paltry 1 million Points of Interest onboard. Most other GPS devices have between 4 and 8 million installed.

Commuters who must regularly tackle traffic conditions and are primarily looking for a "traffic avoidance" device will find much to like about Dash Express.  Dash's TruTraffic is the most accurate and complete traffic service available to date, and it actually works. As a standalone GPS, Dash Express still feels rough around the edges, and a work in progress. I must admit that after several weeks of testing Dash Express, I was happy to return to the relative elegance of my Garmin nuvi. Unless traffic avoidance is your primary objective, you might want to wait until Dash smoothes out the kinks before buying Dash Express.