Now that I’ve had my toy for a couple days, I figured I’d give a review. You can see a picture in the previous post.

My initial reaction was “Wow…sexy! But it’s heavy…” I don’t really know how heavy these types of things are supposed to be. It’s not real heavy, just more than I expected. The design is nice, there are only 10 buttons on the whole thing that perform 5 actions, so it’s pretty intuitive. I like that you can’t do much with it. It’s a music player, and if you want, you can record a voice memo. That’s it. Nothing else to worry about. Very chic.

The first thing to do is load music. I’m a little disappointed that you need external software to add stuff. In my ideal world, it would work just like a normal USB drive…plug it in and it’s good to go. But everything has a driver, so it’s not that big a deal. The player comes with MusicMatch Jukebox to help you manage the songs, but you don’t need to install it. It also comes with Dell DJ Explorer, which is kind of like a plugin to Windows Explorer. Installing this driver allows you to treat the DJ like another hard drive in that you can drag and drop music. So that’s handy and doesn’t have overhead (like MM does). If you have your music separated into genres on your computer and want to keep them separated as such, I would recommend starting with your largest genre and making a playlist for it. Then do the rest. You’ll see what I mean if you keep reading.

Playing the music is as easy as hitting the button. Like I said before, the controls are very simple to use. Forward, back, play/pause, and a scroll barrel get you around the most. I particularly enjoy the barrel. There’s a “back” button, like in a browser, and a “home” button to make menu navigation pretty intuitive and easy to get used to.

I don’t have any, but I know there are a lot of peripherals for this device, and some of them are pretty nifty. You can get an FM transmitter to use in the car, an arm band to strap on when you run, and a few carrying/protective case options. I will be checking them out shortly.

One feature that I would like to see is the ability to use folders. When I copied all my music from my computer to my DJ, I figured it would keep the folder structure and I would be able to play, say, my Christmas folder. But none of my music was in a Christmas folder. I had to go through all nearly 1000 songs and add them to a Christmas playlist (which would have been simple if not for the 500 non-Christmas songs I had already copied over). Folders would be a very nice addition. Once you have music that on your PC is in different playlists, it’s pretty much a hassle to get those back. I will change my mind if there’s a utility to convert your PC playlist to a DJ playlist. That would be a great mod to make.

The only real complaint I have is that Dell took a really long time to get this product ready, and then an even longer time to get it to me. The ship date when I ordered was November 24th. Close to that time I got an email from Dell saying that the shipping was delayed and would ship on or before December 3rd. Around December 2nd I got another email saying that shipping was delayed more, to the 10th, and that due to FTC rules I had to confirm that date with Dell or they would cancel my order. I’ve never heard of that rule, and I think it’s dumb. At any rate, I sent them a nice little email about how this was the second product I ordered from them in a year that they delayed shipping for more than 2 weeks and that I would be reconsidering ordering from Dell again. They sent me an email back apologizing for the inconvenience and said they’d send me the DJ as soon as they could. Two days later, there it was.

It seems like this was one of the last Dell DJ15s sold, because when I ordered it it was no longer on the website (but had been the day before), and the guy I talked to at Dell said it was the last day this product would be offered. A few days later I found out that the Gen2 DJs were coming out very soon. For a first generation mp3 player, this DJ rocks. I’m sure the Gen2s are much better, and I know they’re sexier. At this point, all you can get are a 5GB mini-DJ and a 20GB DJ. I say go for the 20, but wait til Spring to see if the $250 price tag comes down. Still, that price is not bad at all for the product. It sure beats the $400 for an iPod (which I would still love to have, so if your a philanthropist send me an email).

-j