>> Well if you watch many CNET Cartech videos, you know how I feel about the current state of in car GPS navigation; just okay. I mean how often do you really need directions to a new location? And now they're adding traffic information and that's a big plus but it's not ideal, it's often the same stale information that you hear on the radio. There's got to be a better way to get over these hurdles.
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This is the navigation product from Dash. What it does is add layers of richness, location awareness and traffic intelligence we haven't seen before. Let's say I want to go to Dash headquarters just as an example and I hit go. Here's how most units calculate the route. The Dash navigation unit starts to calculate the routes and as you'll see here as this all resolves, it gives me choices based on both criteria and also reports in color coded ways what the traffic's like on that route. Because they are using sensor information from the roads, the vehicles that have this technology will send information back to Dash headquarters about how they are proceeding on a certain route; both in the moment as well as gathering historical data, because these devices are equipped with a historical awareness of how a given road behaves any time of year, any certain time of traffic. Let me show you another area that it's doing some other things and that is the area of the points of interest; you've seen these on your nav system. For example, I'm going to a friend's house, it's his Birthday, I forgot to get a bottle of champagne. I want a wine store. I just type in a keyword here, it doesn't need to be a business name or an address, I hit okay, it's going to start to grind away and find me all of the wine stores or wine keyworded businesses in my area. Now part of what makes this magic happen is connectivity. That's the big deal here. This box comes with two kinds of connectivity that's able to do WiFi either open hot spots or those that have authentication and GPRS cellular network. And the device will smartly detect which one is available, which one to use, they're going to partner with a wireless carrier before they launch so it will have that network that it ties to or it'll look for hotspots wherever it goes and choose the best option wherever it is geographically at any given moment. As for pricing and availability, they promise a Q107 in any of the California markets and nationwide in the summer of '07. as far as the pricing, somewhere in the range of the better GPS units we know, so it's hundreds of dollars, shouldn't be a thousand, shouldn't be a hundred, somewhere in the midst there and the pricing of the subscription that allows the service richness that we've seen, they promise to be roughly akin to satellite radio. Not like a cell phone subscription which would be a lot more money so that gives you some ballpark of the how, what, when and why. That's the Dash navigation system. We'll be looking for it in early '07.
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