8. Conclusion

When all is said and done, it really depends on how confident you are in the company you buy a digital music player from. Nearly all the problems I have with the Dell Digital Jukebox could be fixed with firmware upgrades. That said, do you really want to drop between $250 and $300 to beta test a company's product and get online in their forums to tell them what they should do to improve it? I wouldn't, but you might. However, the domain of digital music sales themselves seems to have prompted Dell to get a product to market too soon (my opinion again). I can't imagine any other reason that they would do things like not allowing you to use the device to transport files without installing software on the destination computer, allowing you to record voice audio but not transfer it to your computer and other conundrums covered in this review. The hardware looks like it's there, as is the means of navigating the device. How about a little quality assurance and testing?

While readers of THG may be willing to mess around with things like bad documentation, the general public probably won't. Maybe that extra monetary savings over the iPod was achieved by making you test the Digital Jukebox for Dell. Maybe they should have waited until it was ready for market. If you don't mind downloading firmware, patches, and are a proponent of things like Ogg Vorbis support and willing to nag Dell until they provide it, buy the device now before Dell spends the development money to get it right. If you want something that works out of the box without any trouble and does what you expect, read reviews, swallow your pride if you have to and spend the extra money on something that's ready for prime time. I'm not telling you to buy an iPod (I don't have one and haven't tested one) but someone else is bound to come up with a PC-based device like this that's worth dropping your hard earned cash on. And, as I said before, this is symptomatic of a large portion of the PC component (and software and operating system) industry. If you're buying it, why do you have to test it?