Dell DJ Ditty disappears to dot

Stan Beer
Thursday, 24 August 2006 15:04

Opinion and Analysis

Last year, it was supposed to be the music player that was going to knock the iPod Shuffle out of the ball park, but now the DJ Ditty from Dell is no more.

Dell, which is not having its most scintillating year, decided to cut its losses after watching the DJ Ditty get slaughtered by the Shuffle over 2006.

Analysts have conjectured why the portable music player backed by a major hardware manufacturer such as Dell failed to make an impact in the market. The DJ Ditty was comparably priced to the iPod Shuffle at US$99 and it also had 512M of Flash RAM on board.

In addition, unlike the iPod Shuffle, the DJ Ditty had an FM radio, a small LCD screen and its audio compression technology enabled the Dell device to hold almost twice as many songs as the Apple player.

All that extra functionality at the same price as the iPod Shuffle, the resources of the largest PC manufacturer in the world behind it, and yet the DJ Ditty couldn't make the grade. Why?

Despite what some analysts may think, this market is not just about the hardware. It's about the music to consumer supply chain. Apple understands this and now so does Dell.