Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the no-beefs-with-better-battery dept.
X Bass writes "Available Tuesday, Dell's 15 and 20GB DJ adds to the growing field of iPod wannabes. Is it worthy or is it just another player that falls short of the iPod's greatness?"
and speaking of photos
by
jbellis
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
the dell dj (gah) is not as good-looking as the nomad zen nx let alone the ipod. Disappointing.:-|
It's an MP3 player ...
by
peatbakke
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
... and... well, I guess that's it. Can I use it as a portable hard drive? Can I use it to sync calendars and contacts between work and home? Can I extend it with accessories for voice recording, download from compact flash cards, play games, or hack away with my own scripts?
I dunno. If I'm going to spend $300 on a gadget, it better do a hell of a lot more than simply play music. I think a full featured iPod with 10 GB of space is hell of a better deal than a 20 GB hard drive with a head phone jack.
Close but no cigar
by
SuperBanana
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Is it worthy or is it just another player that falls short of the iPod's greatness?
Let's see:
iPod: revision #3 or 4(I've lost track.) Like the rest of Apple's electronics, each revision is better than the last and encorporates everything they learned from the previous. Dell: first shot. Probably went to taiwanese companies and said "make us an iPod".
Larger all around
buttons versus iPod's touch-sensitive, sealed, no-moving-parts interface
No remote, no mic, no flash reader, no nifty powered-from-iPod FM transmitters.
Not cross-platform
Not useable as a storage device(or is it? Couldn't tell)
Not nearly as pretty(chrome, white.Tough to beat)
World's most popular online music service versus...musicmatch.
Re:a link that doesn't suck
by
watzinaneihm
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The poster of the story missed a lot of stuff in the blurb. Dell has launched a Musicplayer, a music store, high speed internet connection and a HDTV. Its all there on the page jbellis linked to.
So Dell is no longer a PC maker?
We may joke about this being YAiPOD, but i think having things like the Dell DJ and the Rio Karma out on the market will are a great thing for the iPod.
When the iPod originally came out, it was out of this world. Nobody had seen anything like it. Now it's a couple of years later, and yes it's smaller, and got a bigger hard drive, but not a lot has changed.
Having these new music players on the market is going to make Apple have to start thinking again. I'm not saying that Apple has to come out and give us a brand new, kick ass iPod (although I wouldn't be supprised if they did), it's just that now, they're going to have to work for that marketshare.
Re:iPod greatness!?
by
darnok
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As a proud iPod owner, I have to respond to this;->
The controls are pretty sensitive, but when you're carrying it around with you, you use the remote and disable the controls on the iPod itself. The remote's buttons aren't anywhere near as sensitive - you have to give them a decent push to use them.
The sound quality is winning "audiophile" recommendations; it's more than "just OK".
With respect to the high price tag, Apple got smart when they put a (token) address book and calendar on there. They're very close to useless, but the existence of these features qualifies the iPod as a tax deductible expense for lots of people. If you like, the "50% greater price tag" is being subsidised by the government. The lack of these features on other MP3 players means they don't qualify as being tax deductible, so they "cost more" as a result.
The addition of several 3rd party add-ons is also helping to push the iPod. Along with the expected car charges, battery kits etc., there's a FM transmitter (listen to your iPod through the car stereo without wiring it up!), an addon to dump your digital camera's card contents onto the disc and a few others that aren't of any interest to me personally. The 3rd party market sets the iPod apart from the rest; these features simply aren't available on other MP3 players.
I have to agree about the 8 hour battery life, though; it's not enough to commute to and from work and to use at work, which is what I'd like. Furthermore, since the life of the internal battery is limited to so many recharges, I suspect the iPod becomes a throwaway item after a couple of years when the batteries won't hold a charge any more.
Loads of the greatest classical works ever written were only written so the composer could make some scratch. However a lot of these composers would be working on something amazing on their own time and composed for roalty and richies to put food on the table and get their music heard.
Today the same thing still happens, however I think the artists you're talking about are the ones who are created by the record companies and who are not actually contributing greatly to their art. They just spend money in their spare time and make others look bad.
Paying for good music is a great idea as it keeps great music coming. It's paying for shit that is stupid and detrimental.
Re:Can't load music from outside sources
by
jdreed1024
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Is it really too much to ask for a USB mass storage interface? It's so simple, and everyone who has a computer understands it- it's just a new disk.
Which is another benefit the iPod has going for it. It's a simple firewire disk drive (I think the second generation ones are USB2 drives or firewire drives - I have an older model). Plug it in, and your Mac (or PC, if you formatted it as FAT32) will see it as a plain vanilla firewire drive. You can dump files on there without affecting your its use as a music player at all (well, unless you specifically go in and erase the hidden directory structure containing the MP3s, but that takes effort and it's your own damn fault).
My iPod has saved my ass more than once - once when I had to take my laptop in for servicing, I simply backed up my important data to the iPod, and wiped the laptop drive (I don't trust the technicians). Again when I had to bring a large (read ~2.3GB) data set into work. I did not have a DVD burner (nor did work have a machine that reads DVD-ROMs), and uploading that much data via a cable modem that's throttled to 256Kbps upstream sucks hard. So, I could either have archived the data set with zip or rar and split it across several CDs, or used my iPod. The latter option was decidedly faster, and worked great.
A friend was telling me how I got screwed by spending twice as much on my iPod as he spent on his Nomad, but I told him, add up how much you spent on your Nomad and how much you spent on your 1GB pendrive, and now see who got the better deal. Of course, if you care about WMA audio, then maybe this Dell player or something similar is the way to go for you. Me, I prefer to keep my MP3s on an open filesystem.
-- There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Re:Why is the iPod so much better?
by
Talez
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Re:Why is the iPod so much better?
by
matthew.thompson
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The usual apple reasons.
- It just works.
- It's industrial design is a notch above the rest - the latest version has no moving buttons on the main control area - no pocket fluff can get in and clog the works.
- Firewire syncing and charging from one cable. This is far better than USB syncing as it provide more current and allows for just as fast, if not faster syncs than USB 2.0
- It's smaller - it's about the smallest hard drive based play you can buy
- Sound quality - the iPod doesn't sacrifice sound quality, there are technically better sounding units but the tradeoffs make the iPod a leader
- iTunes integration - ratings, sound check, play lists, etc - make a change on the iPod to a rating and it syncs back to the iTunes database.
- add-ons - line out on the dock, media card reader, microphone etc - the iPod has loads of accessories that are tailored specifically for it rather than generic add-ons which may or may not work.
- User interface - even with the revised top 4 buttons instead of the buttons around the you can operate it one handedly and everything is easy to read and get through.
There's probably more but I can't sit here and type all day - I have 2200 tracks to listen to on my iPod:o)
-- Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Re:Why is the iPod so much better?
by
nuxx
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
3. AAC support. Okay, Ogg Vorbis is more Stalmanist, blah blah blah, but AAC at 128 sounds as good or better, at least to me, as VBR MP3 while taking up less space on the HD.
Psst. Not to be rude, but at 128kbps MP3 and AAC will take the same amount of space for the same length track. AAC will sound markedly better.
I personally used to be a huge Ogg Vorbis fan, then I got an iPod and went back to MP3s for convience. Having acquired a G5 earlier this month, I decided to try reripping parts of my collection to AAC, just as a test. And there is a difference.
I have my iPod running line in to my car stereo, and with 192kbps MP3s (using Apple's encoder, which is very good), they'd occasionally sound flat, somewhat muffled, and just generally not as good as the in-dash stereo. Switching to same-bitrate AACs, everything sounds a bit brighter, almost indistinguishable from audio CDs in the player itself.
I've seen the same results in my living room as well, where I have a second dock running line out straight into the stereo.
Regarding the parent post, though, I think that the big seller with the iPod is the interface. It works night and day better than the competition, and the menuing system is very, very similar to the 'Browse' layout in iTunes.
Apple is big on design and style. Combine this, with a product that works very well and is priced reasonably, and you've got a winner....and it's been proven.
Re:Anything that relies on MusicMatch Jukebox
by
nuxx
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I purchased a 30GB iPod back in May.
And almost returned it.
MusicMatch is such garbage that I had a very, very hard time getting it to see my iPod. Once I did, I had a hard time getting any of my personal music in it. I too had the problem with my iPod being 'full' with only a few songs in it...
Then I found EphPod. This piece of software kept me using my iPod under Windows for a few months. After that I got a used PowerMac G4 Cube, switched to iTunes, and never looked back.
With iTunes for Windows I think that Apple finally has a complete system in place for users to rip and sync music properly. Not the MusicMatch hack...
Slashdot Mirror
the dell dj (gah) is not as good-looking as the nomad zen nx let alone the ipod. Disappointing. :-|
... and ... well, I guess that's it. Can I use it as a portable hard drive? Can I use it to sync calendars and contacts between work and home? Can I extend it with accessories for voice recording, download from compact flash cards, play games, or hack away with my own scripts?
I dunno. If I'm going to spend $300 on a gadget, it better do a hell of a lot more than simply play music. I think a full featured iPod with 10 GB of space is hell of a better deal than a 20 GB hard drive with a head phone jack.
Let's see:
I take it back- not even close.
Please help metamoderate.
The poster of the story missed a lot of stuff in the blurb. Dell has launched a Musicplayer, a music store, high speed internet connection and a HDTV. Its all there on the page jbellis linked to.
So Dell is no longer a PC maker?
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
When the iPod originally came out, it was out of this world. Nobody had seen anything like it. Now it's a couple of years later, and yes it's smaller, and got a bigger hard drive, but not a lot has changed.
Having these new music players on the market is going to make Apple have to start thinking again. I'm not saying that Apple has to come out and give us a brand new, kick ass iPod (although I wouldn't be supprised if they did), it's just that now, they're going to have to work for that marketshare.
As a proud iPod owner, I have to respond to this ;->
The controls are pretty sensitive, but when you're carrying it around with you, you use the remote and disable the controls on the iPod itself. The remote's buttons aren't anywhere near as sensitive - you have to give them a decent push to use them.
The sound quality is winning "audiophile" recommendations; it's more than "just OK".
With respect to the high price tag, Apple got smart when they put a (token) address book and calendar on there. They're very close to useless, but the existence of these features qualifies the iPod as a tax deductible expense for lots of people. If you like, the "50% greater price tag" is being subsidised by the government. The lack of these features on other MP3 players means they don't qualify as being tax deductible, so they "cost more" as a result.
The addition of several 3rd party add-ons is also helping to push the iPod. Along with the expected car charges, battery kits etc., there's a FM transmitter (listen to your iPod through the car stereo without wiring it up!), an addon to dump your digital camera's card contents onto the disc and a few others that aren't of any interest to me personally. The 3rd party market sets the iPod apart from the rest; these features simply aren't available on other MP3 players.
I have to agree about the 8 hour battery life, though; it's not enough to commute to and from work and to use at work, which is what I'd like. Furthermore, since the life of the internal battery is limited to so many recharges, I suspect the iPod becomes a throwaway item after a couple of years when the batteries won't hold a charge any more.
I think paying the wrong artists hurts music.
Loads of the greatest classical works ever written were only written so the composer could make some scratch. However a lot of these composers would be working on something amazing on their own time and composed for roalty and richies to put food on the table and get their music heard.
Today the same thing still happens, however I think the artists you're talking about are the ones who are created by the record companies and who are not actually contributing greatly to their art. They just spend money in their spare time and make others look bad.
Paying for good music is a great idea as it keeps great music coming. It's paying for shit that is stupid and detrimental.
Which is another benefit the iPod has going for it. It's a simple firewire disk drive (I think the second generation ones are USB2 drives or firewire drives - I have an older model). Plug it in, and your Mac (or PC, if you formatted it as FAT32) will see it as a plain vanilla firewire drive. You can dump files on there without affecting your its use as a music player at all (well, unless you specifically go in and erase the hidden directory structure containing the MP3s, but that takes effort and it's your own damn fault).
My iPod has saved my ass more than once - once when I had to take my laptop in for servicing, I simply backed up my important data to the iPod, and wiped the laptop drive (I don't trust the technicians). Again when I had to bring a large (read ~2.3GB) data set into work. I did not have a DVD burner (nor did work have a machine that reads DVD-ROMs), and uploading that much data via a cable modem that's throttled to 256Kbps upstream sucks hard. So, I could either have archived the data set with zip or rar and split it across several CDs, or used my iPod. The latter option was decidedly faster, and worked great.
A friend was telling me how I got screwed by spending twice as much on my iPod as he spent on his Nomad, but I told him, add up how much you spent on your Nomad and how much you spent on your 1GB pendrive, and now see who got the better deal. Of course, if you care about WMA audio, then maybe this Dell player or something similar is the way to go for you. Me, I prefer to keep my MP3s on an open filesystem.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
6) iTunes.
The usual apple reasons.
:o)
- It just works.
- It's industrial design is a notch above the rest - the latest version has no moving buttons on the main control area - no pocket fluff can get in and clog the works.
- Firewire syncing and charging from one cable. This is far better than USB syncing as it provide more current and allows for just as fast, if not faster syncs than USB 2.0
- It's smaller - it's about the smallest hard drive based play you can buy
- Sound quality - the iPod doesn't sacrifice sound quality, there are technically better sounding units but the tradeoffs make the iPod a leader
- iTunes integration - ratings, sound check, play lists, etc - make a change on the iPod to a rating and it syncs back to the iTunes database.
- add-ons - line out on the dock, media card reader, microphone etc - the iPod has loads of accessories that are tailored specifically for it rather than generic add-ons which may or may not work.
- User interface - even with the revised top 4 buttons instead of the buttons around the you can operate it one handedly and everything is easy to read and get through.
There's probably more but I can't sit here and type all day - I have 2200 tracks to listen to on my iPod
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
3. AAC support. Okay, Ogg Vorbis is more Stalmanist, blah blah blah, but AAC at 128 sounds as good or better, at least to me, as VBR MP3 while taking up less space on the HD.
...and it's been proven.
Psst. Not to be rude, but at 128kbps MP3 and AAC will take the same amount of space for the same length track. AAC will sound markedly better.
I personally used to be a huge Ogg Vorbis fan, then I got an iPod and went back to MP3s for convience. Having acquired a G5 earlier this month, I decided to try reripping parts of my collection to AAC, just as a test. And there is a difference.
I have my iPod running line in to my car stereo, and with 192kbps MP3s (using Apple's encoder, which is very good), they'd occasionally sound flat, somewhat muffled, and just generally not as good as the in-dash stereo. Switching to same-bitrate AACs, everything sounds a bit brighter, almost indistinguishable from audio CDs in the player itself.
I've seen the same results in my living room as well, where I have a second dock running line out straight into the stereo.
Regarding the parent post, though, I think that the big seller with the iPod is the interface. It works night and day better than the competition, and the menuing system is very, very similar to the 'Browse' layout in iTunes.
Apple is big on design and style. Combine this, with a product that works very well and is priced reasonably, and you've got a winner.
I purchased a 30GB iPod back in May.
And almost returned it.
MusicMatch is such garbage that I had a very, very hard time getting it to see my iPod. Once I did, I had a hard time getting any of my personal music in it. I too had the problem with my iPod being 'full' with only a few songs in it...
Then I found EphPod. This piece of software kept me using my iPod under Windows for a few months. After that I got a used PowerMac G4 Cube, switched to iTunes, and never looked back.
With iTunes for Windows I think that Apple finally has a complete system in place for users to rip and sync music properly. Not the MusicMatch hack...
This is a good thing, in my opinion.