More on the Ditty

BusinessWeek picks up an Associated article on Dell's new DJ Ditty personal audio player. Dell is claiming the Ditty is a better deal than the similarly priced Apple iPod Shuffle because although both come with 512MB of memory at $99, the Ditty "uses an audio format that compresses digital music files more efficiently" and can hold up to 220 songs while the same-sized Shuffle stores about 120.

Nitin Gupta at the Yankee Group said, "This is some low-hanging fruit,. Apple tried to sell the lack of a screen as a feature with the Shuffle, so the Shuffle is easy to compete against. But you have to look at the whole environment. Apple's iPods are doing fabulous and their online music store, iTunes, is No. 1. Dell's device won't be able to download from iTunes and that's going to hurt."