Dell's Digital Jukebox 20 - Music, the Dell Way

Final Words

The Dell Digital Jukebox is probably one of the more sturdy hard drive based MP3 players that we have encountered. It is literally built like a brick and has good shock absorption due to internal matting and a hard drive retention mechanism that has springs. General everyday activity with the DJ shouldn't bring too many issues if skippage is concerned. Those that lead a more active lifestyle may want to consider a flash based MP3 player.

Though, of the hard drive based MP3 players, the DJ qualifies as one of the better ones in terms of shock absorption design. You can shake the DJ all you want and you can't feel any of the moving parts, nor can you feel the hard drive head accessing the data, which isn't something that we can say regarding many of the other hard drive based MP3 players on the market.

In the sound department, the audio quality of the Digital Jukebox is about the same as the iPod. We do wish that Dell would bundle a more comfortable pair of headphones in the future. Shelling out more money for a decent pair only adds to the end cost, and if it can be avoided, all the better.

The 15GB version of the DJ runs at $199, while the 20GB model costs $80 more ($279). Of all the MP3 players out there, we still would recommend the Apple iPod, as it is the gold standard by which all MP3 players are measured. The only major issue that we would raise with the iPod is the price, which runs noticeably higher than comparable models from other companies like Creative, iRiver, Rio, etc.

For those shopping for an alternative budget buy, we would highly recommend a Dell DJ, probably the 15GB model more so than the 20GB due to the price (the bundle for the 15GB is leaner - no remote or case). This is assuming that the performance is in line with the numbers that we are getting with the 20GB in our labs. Everything else is the same according to the specs.

The battery life on the Digital Jukebox is specified at 20 hours, and we got approximately 19.5 hours in the first couple of days. It tapered off at 18 to 19 hours after several days of constant use and stayed at that battery rating for the duration of our testing. This is fairly in line with battery degradation that we have seen with other MP3 players.

Dell seems to have a really good grasp on the user interface experience, since they have made enough improvements and changes that we prefer it over basically all Jukebox models from Creative. In the software department, we are pleased to see an integrated music library interface with the Windows environment, similar to what Creative has done for the Nomad Explorer. The drag-and-drop ease of use is something not to be understated for those new to MP3 players. The major issue we take with the DJ is the inability to actually store multimedia files (avi, mpeg, wmv, mp3, wav, wma, etc...) on the hard drive as pure data, is something that we would like to see resolved in the future. Dropping these types of files onto the DJ would create a folder in the file's name.

The only items that we could successfully transfer over to the DJ in the Dell File Manager's Data Library were photos, documents, and certain data files. If you want to view some sort of a photo, document, or data file on the storage portion of the DJ, Windows will automatically use a temporary portion of the system's storage to transfer the file, and then open the file. Our preference would be to actually run the file straight off the MP3 player.

The only way that were able to circumvent this was to compress the files into zip, rar, etc. and then transfer them over to the DJ, or rename the multimedia files as dat files or something of that nature. But this requires space on the host computer to uncompress or rename the file if you want to play it, which meant that we couldn't use this like a pure external hard drive from which to play multimedia files when we hooked it up to our laptop.

Overall, we would rank the Dell DJ within the highest tiers of the MP3 players with which we have had the chance to tinker at conferences and/or review. In the future though, we would like to see Dell/Creative resolve the software inability preventing us from directly import multimedia files from the host to the DJ and running the files straight off the player's Data Library.