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Review of Dell's Digital Jukebox
bu115hit writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of Dell's Digital Jukebox. The quick summary is that Dell has provided their own version of an iPod in size and shape, and they gave it better battery life. However, it seems the iPod is still a superior product overall, for ease of use if nothing else."
I own an iPod and a coworker of mine has the Dell. So I've seen and used both.
They are the only two units for sale right now worth having. The others are bulky, ugly, more expensive...why bother.
In the end I went with the lock-in. I bought the iPod becuase I bought alot of iTunes music, and I love my iTrip FM transmitter.
This is an awfully sloppy review.
The price comparison links for the iPod say they're for the 20Gb model when in fact they're for the 15Gb model, thus eliminating a major point in favor of the Dell model: no USD$50 Apple premium.
The conclusion makes it sound like there were many problems with the unit, but reading the rest of the pages I found that outside of the reviewer botching the software installation, his only criticism was that the unit isn't a very featureful voice recorder. (And how he expected things to work properly after he canceled the software installation in the middle, I don't understand. Maybe it could have been smoother, but panning it in the review when he did such an unusual thing in the setup just doesn't seem fair.)
There's almost no discussion of playback capabilities. Those of us who've used these devices know that there are issues to watch for: some devices have problems at certain bitrates, or with handling variable bit rate recordings, etc. No apparent effort was made by the reviewer to address those issues. I'd also have appreciated some discussion of the quality of the audio stage, how much power it has, how it performs with quality headphones, etc.
This "review" reads more like a poorly executed "first look" than the product of a reasonable-length, in-depth evaluation.
Like I've said earlier, the real risk to the Record Labels and the music industry is not Peer-to-Peer networks or piracy, although both may affect them to an extent.
The real hit is going to come in the form of people downloading songs that they like - I do not have to buy an entire album of crap just to listen to one song, and neither do I have to pay $12 for a CD full of crap.
This is the market's way of getting back and eliminating bad music. Sure, there will always be some cross section that will listen to stuff like Britney and the Boybands, but they will largely diminish purely because popular demand for better material will kill them.
Apple, HP, Microsoft and now Dell. Yay! Way to go.
...I just use my $40 MP3 CD player with burned CDs.
yeah, it sounds great to you . and that's what everyone else wants?
Why would you need to take a FLAC audio file on a portable device?
because, some portables are capable of playing through a line-out into good speakers and some players even have near audiophile snr to make a difference.
My God man, why do you need OGG and FLAC support? I have thousands of MP3 and AAC files.
because of freedom. freedom to get an encoders that work on different platforms. because people have already encoded their files this way for their media center. because there's no extra licensing.
The likely reason for needing to install the drivers to use it is that this discourages you from casually going to a friend's house, plugging in the Dell device, and copying over your friend's 3GBs of MP3s onto it. If you have to remember to bring the CD with you, it's that much more likely that you won't bother.
--- Bwah?
I don't know about you, but when I'm listening to music on the move (on my zen nx - ipod has terrible battery life) I don't tend to look inside my pocket that much, on on the passenger seat if i'm driving. Sometimes people seem to forget that loads of us were listening to mp3s on the move way before Apple came out with the iPod. It's a nice looking device, of that there's no doubt, but it's just a piece of electronics that allows me to listen to music - nothing more nothing less. That fact seems to have been lost recently.
As someone who does a lot of travelling and moves around a bit, I see these things as digital wallets. Why else would you want 40 Gb? Dell's device might be more usefull if you could go to any computer with a reasonably modern OS and plug it in, without needing administrative access to install drivers.
There is another problem, USB. The iPod has firewire which doesn't need a host, I can only speculate that this is one of the reasons why Belkin chose firewire for their card reader. USB is good, it's good to have both, but when you want flexibility, USB has it's issues.
Sometimes it's just the little things that count, that make a good design great. When I go to work and work on pc hardware and Windows, I miss the details, nuance and elegance that makes working with my Mac at home a joy to use.