Dash Diary: Third-Party Apps

August 6th, 2008 by Troy Dreier

Editor’s Note: One of the main features of the Dash Express GPS navigator, which we reviewed in March, is that it is the first plug-in navigator with an always-on cellular connection to the Internet. This lets you conduct live Yahoo searches for destinations, but, more importantly, it lets you receive live traffic data from other Dash-using drivers. Here is a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH9f2zUXct0) showing how it works.

Theoretically, the Dash will become more useful as more people buy the device, and their driving data is added to the collective. To see if the service is actually improving, we gave one to our resident GPS expert, Troy Dreier, to test out over a number of weeks. This is his third entry.

What do the Dash Express and the Apple iPhone have in common? Both have opened their platforms to outside developers who can create apps that add completely new functionalities. Sure, the iPhone’s apps have been more successful (with more than 800 available already), but the Dash’s 47 apps (live so far) are a pretty good start. Plus, Apple charges $99 for its iPhone SDK, while developing for the Dash is free.

The Dash program began in May with an announcement at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference. Dash customers can load apps for free from their account at my.dash.net. So far, my favorites are BakTrax Radio, which tells you what songs were just played on all your local stations (extremely handy, since DJs rarely announce songs anymore) and WeatherBug, which provides hour-by-hour forecasts. Other third-party apps include a tool for finding speed traps, a white pages search, and a tool for updating your Twitter account with a message and your current location. My only problem with DashApps is that the saved searches page on my.dash.net, which lets you browse and load several types of pre-made searches, is so poorly organized. There’s no button to call up just the third-party apps, although if you run a text search on “DashApps” you can see them. Browsing through the site’s saved search categories is a huge pain. Click the Leisure heading, for example, to see all of the saved searches in that category, and Dash returns 172 results but only shows 5 at a time! How is anyone supposed to browse the category with terrible navigation like that? I spoke to a Dash representative who said that the site would be tweaked to enhance “discoverability,” but that no major overhaul was planned. Too bad. By the way, Dash has dropped the price of the Express from $399 to $299. Factor in monthly service for live traffic ($9.99 per month with a two-year commitment), and it’s even a better deal than before.

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