Apr
7
My Hope Was Dashed
Filed Under Gadgets
I have used quite a few different GPS devices over the past 10 years, but last week I purchased what I thought was going to be the holy grail of my quest for the perfect GPS: The Dash Express
The Dash is a car mounted GPS that includes wifi and cellular network access so it is always connected to the internet. This means that I can send addresses to my Dash from a web page or search yahoo for an address while I am in the car, but the killer app for the Dash is traffic…
As I drive the Dash collects data on how fast I am going and uploads it so other Dash user can tell what routes are congested and what routes are clear. The device can use these real time updates to intelligently calculate the fastest route. This has limitless potential and will surely be the coolest gadget I own, someday.
The problem is that I was only 30 min into a four day road trip, and being the geek that I am I wanted to try out every menu item on my new gadget. The third menu I tried was “re-align touch screen.” During the setup process I was never prompted to align the touch screen, so naturally this peaked my curiosity.
The process was straight forward: display cross hair on screen, touch the cross hair, rinse repeat four times. Unfortunately, I tried doing this while driving. The result was that I accidentally double touched the third cross hair, resulting in the device recording a touch in the bottom left corner for a cross hair in the bottom right. The result of this mis-alignment means it is now near impossible to navigate the user interface. Touching the bottom right of the screen does nothing and touching the bottom left presses buttons on the far right. As you would expect, the closer the touches get to the top of the screen the more accurate it gets. Essentially I am using a triangle touch pad to navigate a rectangular screen.
In this condition I can only click on user interface controls that are at the top-half of the screen and in the bottom-right corner. I tried to get back into the screen re-alignment menu, but the confirmation button was in the lower left part of the screen and I couldn’t get to it. I then tried to use the “restore to factory settings” menu.; after four attempts I was able to get past the two confirmation screens and the device restarted itself. When it came back online it had wiped itself of my address book and all of my saved searches, but it did not reset the touch-screen alignment! A quick call to customer service confirmed that my device was now us less. On a high note, the Dash customer service rep was very good and offered to send a replacement device to me in two days, but that means I will have to postpone my full review of the Dash until my next road trip and I will be forced to use google maps on my blackberry for navigation in the mean time.
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