Here Comes Dell To Compete With The iPod, Again

Looks like Dell is going to make another run at the music player business. All I can say is “here we go again.” Perhaps you’ll remember its ill-fated attempt to compete with Apple’s iPod. It lasted all of three years.


What’s different this time around? Well last year Dell acquired a little music software outfit called Zing which in 2006 was demonstrating a concept design that essentially put Wi-Fi streaming inside a portable player, thus giving it the ability to, among other things, play Sirius streams.
Sound familiar? Well yeah, actually. My very favorite thing to do with the iPod touch is to listen to streams from Pandora and Last.fm. Okay, Sirius and XM aren’t on the iTunes App Store, but if they know what’s good for them, they’ll offer their subscribers who like to listen via the Web (ahem) an iPhone/iPod touch application that will work via Wi-Fi and/or 3G, but I digress.

Dell’s player might include streaming capabilities, and could also work with Rhapsody, which isn’t a bad service at all, or it might launch its own music service. And hey, if it supports MP3 music files, as it presumably would, it would support music sold on Rhapsody, Amazon, eMusic and whoever else has decided to go the MP3 route. The problem, will of course, come down to marketing and positioning aganst Apple, and we all know how that tends to work out. Its closest rival in the U.S. is SanDisk, which has a market share of about 11%, though it has tended to be a profitable share profitable share.

Or as CNet’s Jim Kerstetter says, this could all be a trial balloon meant to test market potential. It’s not like Dell doesn’t have enough on its plate, though CEO Michael Dell is promising a “big second half” of the year. A music player won’t get Dell there, that much is certain.