Early this year I convinced myself to order The Dash from Bragi. The Dash is a completely wireless headphone/fitness tracker with awesome features. It started as a ambitious Kickstarter project and got funded in a heartbeat. It took them a year longer than expected to ship The Dash like so many other Kickstarter projects. But when it was out the first reviews appeared and all of them were stunned. They praised Bragi for their incredible engineering work that they made it possible to fit all that chips and sensors in those small earbuds. I got carried away by the reviews and finally bought my own. And here is what I have to say.
Bragi advertises The Dash for three main sports: running, cycling and swimming. Because, you know, The Dash is also completely waterproof of course. I am a cyclist. So my main use cases for The Dash were cycling and sitting in front of a computer during work. The Dash has a feature called Audio Transparency. It allows the wearer to hear everything around him while wearing the in-ear earbuds and listening to music. What an amazing feature. I didn’t were earbuds while cycling because I found it too dangerous. But with The Dash I thought maybe it will work because I can turn on Audio Transparency to hear the traffic and still listen to music. How great would that be, right? So Audio Transparency was the first thing I tried when they finally arrived. Standing at home in the kitchen it worked great. Everything I did I could hear through the surround microphone. I was amazed. I got on my bike and after only about ten meters I knew this feature is completely useless to me. The problem with Audio Transparency and cycling is, that normally cyclists move faster than 5 km/h. But when you do that there is something called airflow. This wind makes noise when it happens around objects. The Dash amplified everything it “hears”. So when there is some airflow everything you hear is something like: “Froooouushhhiiuuoooooooouuussssshhhhhuuuuuaaaaaaaaa krkrkllkrloooouuuuuussshh …” It is louded than every traffic and every music one could possible turn on. So Audio Transperancy was gone for me.
The second feature I was eager to use was the simple fact to listen to music without any annoying wires in my way. No wire sounds while walking, no wire between my fingers and the keyboard and moving around in the room without having to stop listening to music. This feature was also destroyed by the fact that The Dash has extremely miserably Bluetooth abilities. When I sat at my MacBook with The Dash paired to it it worked when I sat directly in front of it. But as early as I leaned back the connection became faulty. The music stopped for fractions of a second. Nothing you can enjoy. When I walked around the room the connection get lost when I was approximately two meters away from the computer. So in terms of freely moving around The Dash is no better than any wired earbuds. That said The Dash is even worse than wired earbuds when you would like to keep your phone in the pocket of your trousers, as I do. The Dash has to connect to the phone through the body and your clothes. And because the antenna of The Dash is fairly small this is no easy task. In rooms this works a little bit better, because there are walls where the signal reflects. But it is not useable when you are moving around. At all. I suppose the phone has to be at least in a breast pocket. But I wont stitch pockets to my shirts in order to by able to use earbuds.
Of course as every earbuds with a microphone The Dash can be used to answer calls. You can even use Siri with it. At least in theory. The Dash uses a one ear bone microphone for those tasks. That sounds innovative and interesting but apparently the sound quality is shockingly bad. In fact it is so bad that my parents asked me to turn off “that thing” in the background when I was alone at home with no open windows and no music playing. Siri didn’t work in half the time I tried it. And there goes another feature.
Last there is the user interface of The Dash. There are no buttons, because buttons are for losers I suppose. Both parts of The Dash have a small touch panel on its side. You can tap it and swipe it. There are swipes to the back and to the front for example to get the next or last song playing. Taps are used in different repetitions and durations. So there happen things when you touch it and if that works The Dash talks to you. Like the other features that would be great if it would work. But, as you may have guessed by now, it doesn’t. That can become really frustrating when you stand in the middle of the road and you want to turn off that call but you can’t because the damn thing doesn’t recognise my heavy swiping. When you have to manage to let three taps in a row happen it’s also almost impossible to do that. One of those three taps will not work for sure. So you are standing there looking like someone who forgot to take his meds hammering on your ear. Another big problem with Touch Control is that not only fingers can trigger it. Your clothes can too! One day I walked around outside when it out of a sudden started to rain. When I put the hood of my jacket on The Dash started to go to the next song repeatedly. It was like it didn’t like my playlist anymore. The same happened when I dared to lay down on a pillow while i listed to music with The Dash. The Dash stopped it, launched Siri and tried to pair itself to what do I know what… How can this happen? I mean Bragi’s headquarter is in Munich. Last time I was there people wore caps. Didn’t they thought about that while developing The Dash?
Of course The Dash gets software updates. During the two weeks while I owned a pair I was lucky and there was a software update coming out. I think it was version 1.4:
Dramatic improvement in speech quality during calls, enhanced stability, sensor precision and EarTouch controls. Your Dash is now easier to use, and more accurate than ever before.
It helped a little bit. But it was still far from okay. Bragi promised to fix all the issues I had in later software updates. But I had the choice between waiting an undefined amount of time for something what maybe would never happen, or get my 300€ back now. I wasn’t in the mood for gambling so I returned The Dash after two weeks.
In summary there are four main problems with The Dash: 1. Audio Transparency doesn’t work because The Dash amplifies airflow sounds so you can hear nothing. 2. The Bluetooth connection to the source is too bad. It is only ok when in uninterrupted range of under 1 meter. 3. The microphone of The Dash is so bad that no one can understand you. 4. Touch Control is extremely unreliable. And it gets triggered by pillows and clothes.
Bragi, I like your idea. Truly wireless earbuds with many useful features. But I thing you wanted too much. Maybe you should have stopped when you fitted good speakers in this small cases. Fitnes tracking and Audio Transparency and waterproofness is great but when it doesn’t work it is useless. It is not worth 300€. For 300€ I can easily buy four great wireless earphone with the same quality and better Bluetooth connection. I will follow what you do and I hope you will do anything after The Dash. But I personally can’t imagine how you will be able to survive The Dash. But it is not my job to decide that and somehow there are people who love The Dash. I don’t know how this is possible. Those people must either be VERY forgiving or they use almost none of the features of The Dash. For now I have given up on you, Bragi. I’m eager to see if the rumors of Apple getting in the game of completely wireless earbuds this fall hold up.
Originally published at blog.i-wars.net on June 22, 2016.
