Dell To Take On iTunes?

I hope this pans out:

A few weeks ago we ran a rumor that Dell was working on a new PMP—no biggie, really. Are people really trying to top the iPod at this point? But Business Week has uncovered more of the story from "multiple sources." Apparently Dell's maneuvering isn't about hardware at all (or that much, at least). It's about their iTunes-like software from recently acquired company Zing.

And at this moment, Dell has 120 engineers completing an iTunes competitor that has one thing on its side: Everyone.

Because apparently, Dell intends to share their platform, allowing multiple services and devices to use it. So if you download music from Amazon, that's fine. And if you want to put that music on your cellphone, alright. DRM will still be an issue, of course, but otherwise their platform doesn't care—according to Business Week, Dell just wants an open market where everyone who's not named after a fruit can get a piece of the action.

Look for the Zing software to be on low-priced notebooks as early as September, with more devices to follow soon. The question that still seems unanswered, at least in our interpretation, is whether or not Dell will be distributing this "open" software to products beyond Dell PCs. And that's a key point if they even want to consider challenging the biggest music distribution system in the world today. [BusinessWeek]

This sounds like great news to me. While I love my iPod, I am less than thrilled about being forced to use iTunes and the restrictions that come with it. If Dell can successfully innovate a strong competitor, it will force both iTunes and Dell's software to continue to improve, benefiting everyone.

If Dell really wants to make this good, they should include two key features:

1) The ability to run it direclty off of an MP3 player -- like a form of portable USB software. One of my challenges with iTunes is that I have so many videos, I can't fit all of them on my laptop's hard drive at one time. iTunes doesn't always play nice when I store them on an external hard drive and then connect my iPod to my laptop when I'm on the road. My solution is to back-up all of my videos on an external hard drive and keep a small selection on my iPod and laptop. If I could run iTunes independently on my iPod, I would be much more inclined to get a higher capacity one (160 GB) to store more of my videos on.

2) Make the Dell software able to interface with iPods. I'm sure Apple would probably respond with a software update that would block iPods (maybe even lock them?) from interfacing with it, but I'd love to see the iPods "cracked" in this way.

If anyone from Apple is reading this, in addition to making iTunes able to run directly on an iPod, another much-needed feature is the ability to re-download purchases from iTunes. Right now if you buy a song or a video and accidentally delete the file, the only way to get it back from Apple is to buy it again (unlike Amazon). Highly annoying!