My Road Trip with Dash (continued)
Jun 10, 2008 | Filed under Gadgets, Reviews
After acquiring my Dash Express GPS (read about it here), my first real test with it was my road trip to Houston. You know, for business (not “business”). It’s my first and only GPS system, so I unfortunately don’t have a TomTom or a Garmin to compare it with, but my understanding is that they all have their own little quirks. Dash got me to the Houston area just fine, although it did have a strange habit of recalculating the route every 80 miles or so, as though I’d exited the highway, even when I hadn’t.
When I arrived in the greater-Houston area around rush hour, the best feature of the Dash kicked in. I received a pop-up notification that traffic was detected ahead, and asked if I wanted to re-route. This is the key selling point of the Dash and its subscription service. Since it was more or less a straight shot to my hotel, there wasn’t too much traffic information on the alternate route, and Dash calculated it would only save me ten minutes, anyway, I chose to stay on my original course. The Dash turned out to be right about the traffic (a stalled truck, coincidentally in the very lane I chose), and as it turned out, I probably should have listened to it when I had the chance. Lesson learned.
Throughout the week I was down in Oiltown, the Dash did a fairly good job getting me where I needed to be. It also kept me out of traffic, for the most part, something very hard to do in a commuter city like Houston. One night, after poking around on the web for Houston’s best pizza, I found the address for Star Pizza, and used the Send2Car feature to load the address into my car. Everything worked flawlessly, and the pizza was, in fact, quite good.
One cross-town commute did show a few of the Dash’s major shortcomings, though. Currently, there’s no ability to avoid toll roads, and I was directed onto a “tag only” toll road. Since the different Texas road rape tollway authorities have partnered up, this wasn’t a problem for me. But anyone without a tag would have had some issues. That’s a major problem, and one that they’ve promised to rectify in a future software update. Right now, though, that could be a deal-breaker for a lot of people. Secondly, the Dash had a hard time tracking me a couple of times on this particular trip, for whatever reason. Since the GPS antenna is the same one used in the high-end Garmin models, it could be anything from signal interference to poor map data or bad programming. But since the software is still in a relatively early state (I frequently feel like a beta tester), route recalculations can take more than a few seconds. When you’re speeding along a freeway in an unfamiliar city, and your GPS suddenly decides you’re on a different road, it can be a little scary.
I also used the live Yahoo! Local Search a few times as well. The Dash successfully directed me to a nearby Freebirds and Office Depot without a hitch. The one manual address I tried typing in directly on the Dash (instead of using Send2Car from a computer) did have a small problem. When the Dash didn’t have a GPRS connection, it was unable to find the address. However, once the device was connected and online, it was able to take me to the right place – I think it was a newer building, so that might explain why it wasn’t in the device’s on-board database.
When my trip was over, the Dash safely got me home, and even helped route me around Dallas rush hour traffic, as well. So, it works! But, there are still quite a few issues and snags, which I’ll get to in the next post in this series…
(To be continued)
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