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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 think Dell is still a bit behind Apple in this arena. The IPod Mini looks bad ass and I'm hearing nothing but good reviews. I think I'll have to pick on up one of these days. My only wish is that the IPod Mini came in white. Silver is close, but it's not white.
Show me an iPod with decent Ogg and FLAC support, and I'll show you a few hundred bucks. 80% realtime doesn't cut it.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
So Dell's mp3 player has life of "Up to 16 hours", and iPod's battery life is "Over 8 hours". What does this mean?
8h+ == 16h?
I know it's supposed to be the future of music players and all, but I keep wondering : apparently that new Dell mp3 player (similarly to its iPod rival I believe), use a special high capacity battery to power its 15G hard disk for 15 hours and costs $250.
In contrast, my old Rio CD mp3 player uses a pair of AA batteries that don't require a special charger (if I'm on the road, I'm glad to be able to "recharge" my mp3 player anywhere AA batts can be found), the batteries last several hours too, and I probably carry more than 15G worth of data on my CDs (and more importantly, I can burn as many more as I want). Finally, there's no risk to trash the hard disk heads with shocks. All of that for the $110 I paid for it new 3 or 4 years ago.
So I'm wondering : sure CD mp3 players don't have a particularly exciting form factor, and I have to swap CDs, which isn't sexy, but they're cheaper, they (seem to) fare better with shocks, consume less power, don't use special batteries and have virtually unlimited "storage" capacity. It seems to me those are much better no-nonsense devices compared to those hdd mp3 players. Hip tech fashion victims aside, do these iPod things really make sense for the average Joe Blow like me who just wants music on the go without headaches and wallet-aches?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So I returned the Dell and bought the Gateway DMP-X20. For the same cost, I got all the same features, plus an FM tuner, voice recorder, and audible.com support. So far I've been happy with the Gateway.
-tim
CONS
.86 = 9.52 .62 = 6.1 .56
.36
- slightly wider (not that much)
- slightly thicker (not that much)
- slightly heavier (not that much)
While each dimension might seem only "slightly" bigger/heavier, the results are surprising if you do the math.
The Dell is 56% larger by volume and 36% heavier than the iPod. Figures below.
Volume:
Dell: 4.1 * 2.7 *
iPod: 4.1 * 2.4 *
(9.52 - 6.1) / 6.1 =
Weight:
Dell: 7.61
iPod: 5.6
(7.61 - 5.6) / 5.6 =
I got the inspiration for the parent post from a FARK photoshop contest (warning: LOTS of data -- slow to load). Check out lornamatic's pic.
Actually the Dell battery is not meant to be replaceable either (or at least I consider gluing the battery to the unit a sign that it is not meant to be replaced by the user... I could be wrong :)
Unlike Apple, Dell doesn't seem to have an official replacement program in place. I'm sure they'll institute one once the first wave of customers start finding that their Jukeboxes can't hold a charge, just as Apple did. Also, you can purchase replacement batteries and do the install yourself for about $50, just as for the iPod.
The point, though, is that the Dell is no better than the Apple in terms of battery replacement.
From Fortune's review:
Dell Unveils Its iPod Kryptonite
Bizarro was an imperfect clone of Superman yet still pulled off the occasional superhero feat. So it is with the Dell DJ.
By Peter Lewis
The evil scientist Lex Luthor used his duplicator ray to try to clone Superman, but something went terribly wrong. The result was Bizarro, a good-natured but ugly and backward version of the Man of Steel. Bizarro was the antithesis of cool; his home planet, Htrae, was square.
When Bizarro had good news to announce, he would say, "This am terrible!"
Which leads us into a discussion of Dell's new Bizarro version of Apple's iPod, called the Dell Digital Jukebox Music Player, or Dell DJ for short. Coming from the square world of Dell instead of the hip world of Apple, it's bigger, heavier, and clunkier than Apple's sleek, suave, elegant iPod, which arrived on the scene two years ago and quickly became the most popular portable digital music player on our home planet, Earth. Even worse, the Musicmatch-backed Dell Music Store is the clumsy, Bizarro counterpart to Apple's brilliant iTunes Music Store.
[...]
Bizarro, the pathetic wretch, was driven mad by constant comparisons with the handsome, smart, and sexy Superman he was meant to emulate. So too must the DJ suffer from inevitable comparisons with the iPod, with its two-year headstart. If the iPod did not exist, the DJ might even lay claim to the title of Best Portable Music Player Since the Sony Walkman.
But the iPod does exist, and so do Apple iTunes and the Apple iTunes Music Store, and thus the Dell DJ is doomed to be merely the second-best player on the market.
You seem to be under the assumtion that a lossless compression format would do anything with audio that would have to be heard on cheap, portable headphones or a small, cheap speaker.
:P ;)
;) ) or other lossy audio file? It'd be a drain on the storage, and since there'd be more disk activity a drain on the batteries as well.
This is speaking in general of all portable, small audio solutions, not a dig on any company, just before anyone decides to go on a tangent on me.
With a small device like a iPod or a walkman, you can't bring the type of equipment where a lossless file would show any noticable difference. Hell, even low bitrates probably wouldn't show much of a difference. The lossy compression's artifacting would mostly be covered by the fact that the headphones or speaker can't cover what's being lost in the first place.
So, basically, why FLAC? Why waste that much space on something portable? Why wouldn't you convert that to a Ogg Vorbis (Ogg is a wrapper, not a format. But you knew that, right?
As for Ogg Vorbis support, the iRiver iHP 120s support it and are "only" 400$ or so.
It seems these days as if virtually every USB device comes with a warning saying you should not plug it into a hub. Everything wants to be plugged directly into the CPU. Too bad if you have more than two of these devices.
WTF???
It is not just a matter of needing a powered hub, either. The Tom's Hardware review notes that it was a powered hub with which the Dell digital jukebox failed to work.
I don't know enough about the USB spec to know who's wrong, but it seems to me that if USB devices don't work on a hub, either
a) the hub is defective, or
b) the device is defective, or
c) the USB spec itself is defective.
What's the deal? Are hubs supposed to work, or not?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Instead of getting a geek to test out all these products. Why not get an average joe off the street to use them. Which ever one he can transfer music files to, play and enjoy the whole process, should be the one that comes out on top.
My other sig is a Porsche.
Sorry.... mod this down if like.... but you get what you pay for and when you buy Dell you're not paying a lot. I don't own an iPod nor am I a fan of Apple but I have extensive experience with Dell products and wouldn't spend a dime of my hard-earned cash on anything they sell.
I imagine that the Dell probably does have better battery life than the iPod. But having owned both a Dell Inspiron and now a Powerbook, I know that - at least when it comes to laptop computers - Apple gives a much closer-to-the-truth estimate of expected battery life than Dell does. Brand new, my Inspiron would get maybe half the battery life that Dell said it should (slightly over two hours in real life; Dell was saying a bit over four).
#DeleteChrome
I am a DJ and I have 38.3 gigs of music... 5514 "songs" where a couple hundred of them are live dj mixes (whole pieces.. betwee 50 and 120 minutes long on average,) so that equates to about 25.2 days of straight music.
I generally like all of my collection, there isn't any "fluff" in it.. it's all collected carefully and I would much prefer to have a device which could just hold the entire library.
I mean.. 20gb.. 40gb.. 60gb.. for laptop size mini drives, yes, it is important to keep it smaller than larger as a financial concern when building the units.. but.. i'd *definitely* take the larger drive; my music collection isn't shrinking.
As I use digital media nearly exclusively, (I buy cds, rip them, put them back in the jewel case and then they go to live in a box...) a higher capacity device is extremely important to me.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
I've had mine since before the holidays (actually meant to do a review and never got around to it). Worked perfectly out of the box. My wife and I used it for a cross country trip over the Christmas break, and never had an issue with it. I would put 16 hours as minimum for battery life. It survived on one charge the entire distance from Northern Virginia to Omaha (about 1200 miles, and 18 hours) and still had two bars on the meter left. Obviously - batteries are always a YMMV.
Altho not as small as the iPod, it has a more rugged feel to it. More solid, and less fragile. Plus it doesn't look so friggin' girlie.
Sound is great, but those earbuds *are* crap. The thing puts out enough power to push studio headphones - cheap ones, yes, but still. On good phones it sounds great.
The version of MusicMatch included with it sucks. For those (like myself) that hate reading manuals, it is absolutely horrible. But the Windows Media Player access is logical, so I normally use that.
If you do not have USB 2.0, get it. My initial transfer of about 11GB of songs took overnight. I bought a 2.0 card the next day. Transfers are exponentially faster now. Oh, and I run it through an *unpowered* hub when I use the USB1.x connection, and never had any problems with it being detected.
Over all, I like it. Plus it's well padded with the C note I saved by avoiding Apple.
All kidding aside, my Rio Volt started to fall apart at the tiny screws. It's a weak-point in the structure that can easily become unfixable.
Dell licensed the software from Creative Zen series.
I feel that I won't get modded up because i'm so late to the thread. (and i live for karma)
But I am very surprised that nobody has mentioned the very important facts about Dell Jukebox. In fact, I am close to believing that everybody is talking out of their ass when it comes to hdd mp3 players.
My brother has a Creative Jen Xtra. It cost 270 bucks for 30gb model. It's the cheapest hdd player ever when it comes to gb/dollar. I found a guy who had a Dell Jukebox. Both of them had the exact same interface. I didn't see enough of the dell to see if it's got all the creative's EAX stuff, but the user interface is exactly the same.
Now, you don't know how bad the interface is. And frankly, if you've never really used iPod, I suppose you'd think it's pretty nifty. You just don't really know how good life can be.
First of all, dell/creative doesn't work as usb mass storage device. Even iPod works as firewire mass storage device!! The device driver and the provided software sucks. Again, perhaps you don't know how good things can be unless you are used to iTunes/iPod combo. All I know is that the drivers for dell/creative cause crashes on windows xp sometimes and half of the times it doesn't crash, it doesn't work. It's like crapshoot.
On the dell/creative interface, it is the most convoluted thing. No designers in the world has ever come up with how you can comfortably present all the complexity of hdd mp3 device. No one. For example, in iPod, there is no way to delete songs or find bps of songs or edit existing playlists. Apple made a decision when they decided to hide all that for simplicity of use.
On dell/creative, you can do all of the above. The tradeoff? You can't just play a song by clicking on it! When you click on a song, it brings up a menu and you scroll to "play this song" and it enters the "currently selected" section where it will be played. Most operations make you hunt through menus and godawful number of clicks.
Sizes. dell/creative is big. I can use my iPod comfortably with three fingers. My index finger supports iPod, my middle finger balances, my thumb clicks buttons. I have to use the whole hand to hold the dell/creative. Especially creative zen is awkward because there are buttons to operate on the side of the players. You have to coordinate all five fingers which all has buttons assigned to it.
I bet you, if I had gotten dell/creative about an year ago, i would have thought it was pretty sweet. But alas, I got an iPod. I know how good things can be. I tell you, no reviewers have spent enough time with any number of mp3 players to really know how good iPod is compared to the others. Trust me, we wouldn't be hearing about no iPod killers.
For the records, I am an ex-linux user of about 3-4 years. Then I became freebsd user. Then I got a used crt imac g3 600mhz (fastest computer i own). My freebsd server still serves files over samba and acts as the gateway.
I haven't seen the Dell, but I have a similar wheel on my Creative Jukebox 3, and I never have problems (took about 2 days to learn to use it efficiently). Admittedly the menus are, based on your description, a lot more cleverly designed on the Jukebox than the Dell. Unless the unit is actually built badly, I don't think this is as big an issue as you make it out to be.
By the way, this might be good because the way you enter names in other sections is to wheel tediously through letters A-Z, then choose the options to shift to letters a-z, then wheel to the actual letter you want.Not being an iPod owner, but having seen an iPod and played with one for a few minutes, I ask this question with pure innocence and no intended hidden meanings: how do you do it on an iPod? I don't remember it having a QWERTY keyboard anywhere on the device. (For reference, the Jukebox has the same system, but the wheel is pretty clever, eg. if you spin it fast it skips through a lot faster than if you move it slowly. It's not the best but then again I don't tend to write any essays on it... it does the job considering how often it's used.)
And finally...worst of all...the Dell DJ does not detect as a standard USB2 device!One reason for proprietary software is also to prevent you from loading up some bizarre non-mp3 file (even in my collection I had some that were really MPEG layer 2, and didn't even know it since they were .mp3 and Winamp just plays everything) and crashing their (probably poorly written) firmware. Then there's the whole DRM aspect. If it shows up as a drive, how will you stop people copying songs off it? Or will it show up as a drive that is write only (no reading in windows == no listing, if you can even set permissions like that, and not being able to see what's already on there would be teh gay). As for releasing a player with no DRM ... well ... it's nice to dream but ;p
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
haven't seen the Dell, but I have a similar wheel on my Creative Jukebox 3, and I never have problems
.mp3 and Winamp just plays everything) and crashing their (probably poorly written) firmware.
I haven't used the Jukebox, but I highly doubt the Dell uses a similar design. The wheel on the Dell is the diameter of a pencil. It is made of cheap plastic and has a very firm groove in the "notches" that the wheel ticks off. The end result is you can't spin it, you roll it. The wheel has no inertia and will stop as soon as your thumb stops moving. You have to roll it repeatedly to travel a longer distance. There also does not appear to be any acceleration factor. Flicking it quickly will yeild the same travel as rolling it slowly. A complete roll will only travel about eight lines, so it takes five complete up-down motions to travel from A to Z on the letter selection screen. I can't even imagine trying to get to ZZTop when the thing has a few hundred albums. So you tell me if it seems similar or not to what the Jukebox has.
I ask this question with pure innocence and no intended hidden meanings: how do you do it on an iPod?
Simple. The iPod doesn't require any text input on the unit. It's all done through software. You can do everything from set the device's name to equalizer settings for an individual song using the nice full screen iTunes GUI, then hit sync and have everything come over. But even if I had to use the iPod wheel for text entry, I have a feeling it would do it well. There is a few inches worth of contact point on the wheel. One full cycle of the wheel can travel a huge distance...not to mention I can instantly start a new loop without having to move my thumb from bottom to top. It's also very speed sensative, scrolling quickly when I whip my thumb around the wheel and ticking off line by line as I slow down.
One reason for proprietary software is also to prevent you from loading up some bizarre non-mp3 file (even in my collection I had some that were really MPEG layer 2, and didn't even know it since they were
Bzzzz, no, thanks for playing. You can't copy music to a portable player in removable media mode. The files are actually stored in some subdirectory that the player never sees. Any files you copy over to Dell or iPod are stuck in a lockbox and can't be accessed by the player (although there are probably hacks out there that can do it). So, this is not a valid issue.
Then there's the whole DRM aspect. If it shows up as a drive, how will you stop people copying songs off it? Or will it show up as a drive that is write only (no reading in windows == no listing
Again you do not understand the difference between the portable player and the portable storage function of the player. DRM is irrelevant to files on my computer. An external hard drive is not supposed to know or care what I'm copying to it. A portable music player ostensibly is because they don't want people transferring GB of music from iPod to iPod...but as we already mentioned, that isn't possible because player software puts music in a special folder and anything else goes outside.
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
It's similar, but not the same. The jukebox wheel is about 1.5cm in diameter, and it's the same shape as most volume controllers in CD drives. It does have acceleration tho, flicking it quickly with your thumb gets you almost all of the way from a to z.
Simple. The iPod doesn't require any text input on the unit. It's all done through software.So how do you name stuff you recorded? That's what you were talking about on the Dell isn't it? The Jukebox lets you control it all through the software too, AND on the player itself in case you need to. So you aren't losing anything, but you gain an extra ability you don't have to use if you don't want to. But it is useful for searching for songs by title/artist/etc ... even then you need only the first few letters.
Ah ok, so how about this deal, I give you some of my drugs, and you just forget everything I said about that ;p It just didn't click ...
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
I remember the 80's (mostly) and 4 GB ain't gonna cut it for me. Certainly a portable is not going to be the primary home but it needs to be able to hold a full copy of my library. I simply don;t know what I'll want to listen to later in the day. Probalby because of the mood swings I go thru....