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Dell is doing its own little ditty.
This holiday coming season, Dell Inc. plans to offer three new Dell DJ portable music players, starting with a tiny, flash memory-based model called the Dell DJ Ditty, sources familiar with the companys plans said.
The Round Rock, Texas, company is likely extending its Dell DJ line in an effort to compete with Apple Computer Inc., whose iPod is the dominant music player, as well as to carve out a larger portion of the market for pint-sized players.
Dell, which has been selling televisions, music players and a number of consumer electronics goods as part of plan to increase its annual revenue, had in the past competed largely on price in the music player space.
It sold the Dell DJ models, which use Microsoft Corp.s Windows Media Player and the Yahoo Inc. Yahoo Music Musicmatch or Napster LLCs Napster To Go music services, for less money than respective Apple iPod models that had about the same storage capacity.
However, this time around Dell is rolling out more feature-laden DJ models, in addition to targeting aggressive prices.
The DJ Ditty, for example, will come with a built-in LCD screen and an FM radio receiver, two things that are not available on Apples flash-based iPod Shuffle—buyers will have to step up to the new Apple iPod Nano to gain an LCD screen, for example—and its also planning to add color screens and an option that adds XM Satellite Radio to its hard drive-based Pocket DJ and Dell DJ models, the sources said.
The Ditty DJ, which could bow as early as next week, will offer 512MB of memory and cost under $100, the sources said.
Dell is expected to advertise the DJ Ditty as having enough capacity to hold about 220 songs or two hours worth of music, assuming a person uses 64KBps encoding and each song stored on the device averages about four minutes in length.
The DJ Ditty will be packaged with different colored caps that people can install, depending on their taste, the source said.