Dell abandons hard-drive music players

By Simon Aughton

Posted on 6 Feb 2006 at 16:47

Dell has decided to cease production of hard-drive portable music players. The company will instead focus on the Flash memory-based DJ Ditty.

'We saw an opportunity to streamline and consolidate our portfolio,' Dell spokesman Liem Nguyen said. 'We made a decision to transition from the hard-drive products to Flash players at the beginning of this year.'

Dell launched its DJ player in 2003 - having previously sold iPods for a short while - but was not able to repeat its success elsewhere as Apple's player went from strength to strength. In fact, such was the limited appeal of the Dell devices, that they were never released outside the US.

Dell's announcement follows the recent closure of MP3 player pioneer Rio and iRiver's rumoured decision to withdraw from the European market.