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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."
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?
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 =
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.
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!
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'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.
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.