Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Updated April 17th, 2008. Unfortunately Amazon will not allow me to change the star rating but as of today, I am officially downgrading the product rating to 3 stars. From very good/great to just good. Please see Cons sections (7) for details.
Let me start this off by saying that I have used all major brands of GPS.
Magellan (1st Gen + 2nd Gen [Maestro]), Garmin (1st Gen + 2nd Gen [Nuvi]), and Mio 230. Sadly, of all the above, my favorite was the 1st gen Magellan.
A summary of what I think of the other devices:
1) Magellan Maestro: Good GPS hampered by a mule of a cpu and horrible software stability. The sucker is slow and crashes like no other. It could've been good but instead became a liability.
2) Garmin Nuvi: Better than Magellan, very stable but has no predictive type-ahead addressing. Garmin need to pull their head out of their thighs and add this feature. Very little faults but also nothing to shout about and not to mention the most expensive. Way over-priced.
3) Mio: Best screen contrast/resolution out of the 3. Very smooth resolution and gps update. It's way too chatty. I do not need to be alerted of every bend in the highway. Suffers from usability problems and just plain to hard to use. No left or right street announcement for destination.
Now the initial review for Dash Express
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Pros:
1) Excellent screen resolution and brightness. More on the brightness later.
2) Traffic flow is magical. Has to be seen to appreciate. Extremely accurate traffic data. Based on recent events I believe there is a 5-10 minute lag between real-world traffic and sigalert/push to dash.
3) Usability is top notch. Simply the easiest GPS I have used to date.
4) Minimalism. Have you seen GPS where there are so many stuff on screen that you can't even see the map? Dash is smart for presenting a beautiful and minimalistic layout where the emphasis is given to the map, as a GPS should. Finally!
5) Automatic Re-routing is both fast and accurate.
6) Routing so far has been excellent.
7) Very responsive. Touch operations are responsive and consistent.
8) Wifi supports WPA/WPA2.
9) Left/Right side of street is spoken for destination. Mio does not do this.
10) The only device to give me the route I actually take from my home to my parents' house. Not sure if it's luck or based on traffic info.
Cons:
1) Screen is too bright for night operation, even when tuned to lowest brightness. Hopefully they fix this. It appears they are using a very dark gray of blue for the night background when they should use pure-black for better contrast.
2) Cannot accurately judge car direction when coming from stand still to very slow motion. Think turning on the car in a parking lot.
3) Text to Speech quality on street names is bad. The spoken content is concise and excellent but the street names voice renders are just bad. Has a lot of trouble with Spanish street names. Half the streets in Los Angeles are Spanish based. For example, Cordova St is pronounced as Cord-"ee"-va Ave. Even worse, Virginia Road is spoken as Virgi-"ne" Road. Other systems don't have this problem. Dash needs to license a higher quality speech engine.
4) When you select a destination, it will give you 1-3 routing options to choose from. This process is a bit slower than I would like.
5) GPS re-acquisition after park/shutdown is slow.
6) No auto-zoom in when initial setting is zoomed way out or auto-zoom out when on highway to see more distance.
7) Noticed 2 cases which broke Dash. A) Driving past a destination in a straight line for several blocks made Dash to perform never-ending "recalculating" when a "u-turn" redirect should be used. B) When going to the LAX airport via route of I10W -> I101S -> I105W, on the ramp from I10 to I101, it first said to get on ramp on left to 101 which is correct but then it starts changing the name of 101 ramp to 105 ramp before correcting itself after I got on to 101.
*April 17* Was on highway CA-22 south/east bound and I missed the "beach st/blvd" exit. The unit did not start to recalculate until nearly 2 miles after the intended exit. Worst to come. Recalculation goes into an infinite loop/stalls and by now I was about 4 miles off the Beach exit and on a local street heading north on Brookhurst. The unit crashed and rebooted itself shortly after. During this whole time, the map shows me still on CA-22. It is unforgivable for the unit to have this problem. Having a GPS is supposed to save you from the huge problem of missing or taking the wrong exits when traveling on freeways. Due to this problem, I have downgraded my product rating from 4 to 3 stars.
8) In 3D mode, did not test this in 2D mode, vehicle position on map is approximately 2-3 seconds behind real-life for local traffic speed. For example, once you past lets say Garvey Ave in real-life, your virtual car on map will pass the virtual intersection about 2.5 seconds later. This is very annoying and they need to calibrate the firmware to compensate for this "lag". Further test show there is a ~100ft lag between car on screen and actual location, at least in the Los Angeles area. This is beginning to annoy me quite a bit. Other gps systems do not exhibit this problem.
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Overall:
Good new GPS with exciting future but the company must make fixes as soon as possible. If they do not fix the critical problems I have mentioned here, re-routing issue, night-time visibility, and speech quality, within the next 4-8 weeks, this product will become obsolete by more rounded competition such as Nuvi despite the ground-breaking traffic-view feature.
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Stuck in traffic and want to know if you are going to make that meeting on time, or need to call and warn someone? Will you make it to your kid's recital, or be home in time for dinner? Wouldn't it be nice to know which route to work is going to be faster today before leaving your driveway, and be automatically updated if traffic changes once you're under way? Knowledge isn't just power, it's a time-saver, too. And Dash Express has the smartest, most advanced traffic solution available?the innovative Dash Driver Network. Combined with comprehensive historical and sensor-based traffic information, the Dash Driver Network provides Dash users with the most detailed, accurate and current traffic picture available today. Dash approaches traffic in an entirely different way - by collecting it from other people driving real commute routes, during real commute times. Each Dash Express anonymously and automatically sends its position and speed back to servers at the Dash Network Operations Center. The Dash servers then update all other Dash devices in the area with current road speeds. That way, members of the Dash Driver Network always have the best, most up-to-date traffic information available. It's a growing network for better information. However, even the first Dash devices in an area get traffic data that's superior to other GPS devices. That's because Dash devices receive traffic info from road sensors, commercial fleets and other sources through our partnership with Inrix, the premier traffic data provider in the U.S. Starting with the first devices in each market, Dash adds further value by using these initial cars to calibrate the sensor data. This lets Dash assign it a high (straight line) or medium (dotted line) confidence rating, giving you all the information you need at a glance. The Dash Driver Network provides coverage on nearly 2 million miles of US road, and provides the only source of live traf
Click here for more information about Dash Express Two-Way Internet-Connected Portable GPS Navigator
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