February 5th, 2006
Dell Drops Hard Drive MP3 Player Line
By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
The passing of the hard-drive based MP3 players at Dell went very quietly. According to Bloomberg, the decision was made to discontinue these lines in late December and early January. Dell will continue to sell the DJ Ditty (pictured above), which has 512MB of flash memory, as well as players from other companies.
The hard-drive Jukebox players held 2,500 to 15,000 songs. The DJ Ditty, which weighs 1.29 ounces and includes an FM radio, stores as many as 220 songs, according to Dell’s Web site.
“We saw an opportunity to streamline and consolidate our portfolio,” Dell spokesman Liem Nguyen said. “We made a decision to transition from the hard-drive products to flash players at the beginning of this year.” Source: Bloomberg via Statesman.com
We Say: Much of the press on this has centered around Dell failing to take market share and thus giving up on the hard-drive based players. While this may indeed be much of the story, I wonder about the statement by Nguyen above. It could, in fact, mean that Dell is going to focus on and introduce more flash-based players this year. Or it could mean that Dell, like many companies before it, has found the iPod nut too tough to crack.
Mister Moy says:
People used to paying ridiculous prices for Apple products, and thus the iPod makes a very nice margin. People are used to paying reasonable prices for Dell products. For any iPod competitor of theirs to sell, it would have to be just as good as the iPod, but $75 cheaper–no wonder it didn’t work out.
February 5th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
steve says:
Dell just doesn’t get the concept of a system … When you get an mp3 player you need a jukebox that smoothly integrates with the player.
There is also this issue of “affordable luxury” … Dell just screams “cheap” and the core demographic that wants these devices is turned off by that.
If they want to make something that sells, they have to attack the problem at a much deeper level than they have.
February 5th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Stephen says:
Hell, I’m still trying to figure out why an FM tuner is considered a good feature. Has anyone listened to FM radio lately? Here near NYC there are no FM stations that one can listen to for more than 5 minutes at a time. A much better feature would be to include an AM tuner. That way you would have the player to listen to music and to tune in news or talk radio, which is overwhelmingly AM. Music on FM radio is irrelevant.
February 6th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Lockergnome's Mobile Lifestyle says:
Dell Drops Hard Drive MP3 Player Line
Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes The passing of the hard-drive based MP3 players at Dell went very quietly. According to Bloomberg, the decision was made to discontinue these lines in late December and early January. Dell will continue to sell…
February 6th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
ClapekDodki says:
eros-amatoriali sesso duro
July 16th, 2007 at 6:04 am
ClapekDodki says:
eros-amatoriali 2007-05
July 17th, 2007 at 2:56 am