Dash Navigation is planning a launch of their internet connected GPS device in the new year, and I was fortunate enough to take a ride with the unit last week and two folks from Dash, Gina Bender, Director of Communications and Eric Klein, Senior Director of Product Marketing. The newly designed unit is sure to be on display at CES 2008, and I was able to see first hand what's going to be the core offering of Dash. Dash also announced today that they are taking pre-orders for the unit at their website, with delivery happening in the first quarter of the year. The unit will cost $599, and will have a monthly subscription rate as low as $9.99 with 2-year commitment.
Connectedness is the key premise of offering a better user experience, allowing for updated maps, internet connected fuzzy logic search, the ability to 'Send to GPS' addresses from any internet browser that you want. The Dash website has also been updated to provide some online capabilities so that you can configure your unit and save certain data sources and searches at your 'My Dash' page.Traffic alert and planning features are pretty important next generation offerings that are enabled by the design choices made by Dash. Not only did they pre-load historical speed data from Inrix, but because you are connected, you can receive traffic alerts that
are generated by other Dash users out on the roads. We were driving around Boston today and with about 50 of the 2,000 Beta users (out of 53,000 applicants) on the roads of Boston for the last couple of months, we saw traffic patterns that those units anonymously reported in. Construction near us showed up in red at a local intersection and as we drove around you could see the 'trails' that were reported by those beta users due to other small construction projects. Very cool and amazing.
Finally, when we were looking at the unit, an update came available, and asked us if we wanted to download it. Oh, yea, connected GPS gets updates where ever you are, if you want. You had the option to delay, but it just underscored for me the fact that this thing is going to be up to date and the applications will be tweaked to make certain that they are the best possible experience that you can get. I was assured that this was not a regular enough event that it would be annoying. This asked because we had just turned the unit on, and as it was booting, it checked for an update.
Dash asking for an update - Always up to date software and Maps.....
(Via GPS Lodge.)
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