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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."
Straight from Steve Jobs's own weblog comes a more succinct review
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.
You know, overreacting aside, I find Apple's choice in regards to the iPods battery very odd.
I look at my Sony Clie and my GBA-SP. Both have a tiny little screw that holds the battery cover on. Both my Clie and the GBA-SP are smaller than the iPod, and yet they still managed to provide user-access to the battery.
I haven't seen the miPod up close yet, but I imagine they don't have a battery cover either.
I think Apple just doesn't like screws.. they're definately anti-screw. Maybe it's because Apple hasn't discovered a way to make them glow yet.
"My only wish is that the IPod Mini came in white."
Don't you know why iPod mini colors were chosen?
The iPod was purchased as my primary entertainment device, and I later purchased a Dell DJ for use with a project that I am working on for a school.
The iPod was purchased based on winning design, features, available accessories (iTrip, CF reader, etc). The Dell DJ was purchased because it was $219 no tax no shipping for the 15MB version, making it by far the cheapest portable device that can store several GB of data.
However the interface on the DJ is horrid. The display does this "windowing" thing where clicking the main button never performs an action but only leads you to a menu of actions. To do the most simple thing in the world, resume playback where you left off, you have to click three times.
The primary clicker is also a joke. The combo scroll wheel is tacky and too loose. Often I will go to click only to have my thumb spin the wheel down instead. The recording button is a nice idea, but you have to hold it down to register, and there is no way to name your recordings so you know what they are. (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.)
Also, no dock for the DJ. It uses a USB2 connector on the top...bad design. The connection is so tight I was afraid to plug it in for fear of breaking it. Pulling it out makes me just as fearful.
And finally...worst of all...the Dell DJ does not detect as a standard USB2 device! WTF was Dell smoking? Am I supposed to carry the Dell DJ driver CD around at all times? Why not just carry my data on CD instead? The whole point of portable storage is to load it up, and take it anywhere you need the data to access it. The iPod is detected as a standard firewire/USB device on every version of Windows 98SE or higher.
Overall, it will serve its purpose for a prototype, but Dell needs to spend some serious money to come out with a 2nd generation version that addresses these issues. I understand they can't use a wheel like Apple does, but there has GOT to be a better analog input than what they came up with.
Oh, one last nail in the coffin...the include software is from MusicMatch and is without a doubt the worst piece of software I've ever used. There is no automatic sync. The option to sync your player and computer is buried three levels down in the software. The ID3 tags you make in music match don't translate to the player (will sort 1 10 11 12...19 2 20 21 22 on the player, ignores track number). The only saving grace is that as a standard Windows Media device, you can use pretty much any other program to sync the device, but I think Dell was really stupid to sign up with MusicMatch instead of just writing their own (given that Windows does all the work, all they need is a pretty interface with a big "Sync" button).
That's about all that comes to mind. I wouldn't recommdn the Dell unless you were someone who planned to load their entire collection once and then never ever ever touch the player again. If you had to sync/update the Dell DJ on even a weekly basis it would drive you up the wall. Spend the extra $100 and get the 10GB iPod or the extra $40 and get the 4GB iPod mini.
-JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I called Dell sales and Dell technical support, and Dell has no method for replacing the battery (outside of warranty), and the battery is not user replaceable.
(Also, iPod's battery is replaceable, via several different methods.)
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!
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.