Opening day blues for Dell's download shop

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 17 Feb 2009 at 14:28

Dell has brought its online software shop to the UK, though PC Pro's first poke around the store has revealed there's still a few kinks to be ironed out.

Dell has been offering a software download shop in the US for some time, but in bringing the shop to the UK it's bulked out its offering to include games and music downloads, with mixed results.

Though the shop offers MP3 tracks at the 79 pence-per-track standard set by iTunes, its interface won't give the market leader any cause for concern.

There's no visible information regarding the bit rate of the tracks, nor the format they're being offered in - though the press release informs us they're MP3 tracks. We're still waiting to hear back from Dell regarding the bit rate.

Away from the front page, album prices confusingly revert to euros, only switching back into pounds once you've added them to your basket. And while Dell claims every music label is represented in its track list, there are notable omissions, including Nirvana.

Another design oddity which had the PC Pro office scratching its head is the Kaspersky link, which bafflingly leads to a page offering Trend Micro Internet Security 2009 and BitDefender Internet Security 2009 for the princely sum of zero pounds. Attempts to take advantage of these bargains are thwarted as they cannot be added to the basket. The store is also somewhat lacking in big names, with Symantec, Norton and McAfee missing from the security suite line-up.

The software site is somewhat better, with prices roughly comparable to Steam. However, unlike Steam in which the price of repeat downloads is included in the original, the Dell download shop asks for an additional £5.75 for the same service for one year.

The company is promising to add movie downloads as the "service evolves".