The new device
Hello, I’m Robert Acker and I am in charge of marketing here at Dash. If you are a repeat visitor to our Website, you’ll probably notice tomorrow morning that the photo of the Dash Express will look different. (I’ve included it in this post for those that can’t wait until tomorrow morning.) While we were fond of the old design and it’s nostalgic look–kind of like a giant, vintage 1983 HP calculator–we’ve been working on this new design for many months. We’re still finalizing the color scheme and labels, but generally, this is the product that will ship to consumers.
We received some great feedback from our road testers and have integrated much of it into this new product. Some of the key changes we’ve made include switching to a larger 4.3” display, moving the power connection to the mount, adding a larger (equals louder) speaker, and adding a bigger internal battery so the Dash Express will run longer without external power. We also replaced the many hard buttons down the side with two touch-sensitive buttons on the top. Our testers told us they loved having a dedicated volume button (ever gotten a cell phone call in your car?) so one of these two buttons makes a volume panel appear and disappear on the display. The other button gives you the ability to instantly access the menu (or make it go away) without having to dedicate space on the map for an on screen menu button instead.
As our first consumer product, we optimized this new design for the best performance. Since this will be the first GPS product designed from the ground up around connectivity (and we’ll be letting you know about more cool connected features in the coming months) we wanted to make sure that that connectivity just happened. So, we kept the same high gain Wi-Fi antenna we used in our road test devices (which most of our testers let us know gave them great reception) and made sure the battery was big enough to run the device without external power with the Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS radios all running. While the new design isn’t as thin as some other GPS devices on the market, we hope most of you like the new look and agree it will look good on your dash.
September 17th, 2007 at 4:10 am
September 17th, 2007 at 4:11 am
September 17th, 2007 at 8:56 am
We really can’t wait!!!
September 26th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
I happened by chance to come directly to the Dash website to see if there is any news that has been published via the “News” RSS feed.
Turns out there are new updates that are not showing up PLUS this great blog.
It would be helpful to send a notification tot he mailing list to let everyone know you have added this feature.
Also, you may want to investigate why the news updates are not showing in the RSS feed.
I have added the blog to my reader, so I’m back in touch!
Thanks,
Keith
October 23rd, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Will it have voice recognition? This to me will be great if it work’s properly.
December 20th, 2007 at 6:52 am
Coolest. GPS. Ever.
I read that for traffic, besides historical speeds and live data, it also “learns your local bottlenecks as you drive.”
Any additional info on this feature?
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:18 pm
I can’t wait for it to come out.
it would be nice if you add a bluetooth module to turn the device into an in car speaker for the cell phones as well, I think this will make sure that the device is 99.999% of the time enabled in the car and provide additional safty for the driver as well