Report: Dell puts MP3 player plans on ice

Remember the rumors earlier this year that Dell might have a new MP3 player ready for the holidays? Well ... never mind.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has an anonymous insider who claims that Dell's plans (first reported back in July) for a simple, bargain-priced digital MP3 player—one that might have boasted Zing's real-time music streaming software—are on hold, "indefinitely."

Dell will apparently continue developing the Zing software for release on its new PCs, according to the WSJ; among other things, the revamped Zing app will reportedly aggregate the offerings of various online music services for easy shopping.

But it sounds like Dell may have gotten cold feet in terms of jumping back into the MP3 player business, which it abandoned in 2006 after its Digital Jukebox line of players failed to make a dent in Apple's iPod juggernaut.

Reviews of Dell's old MP3 players were mixed, at best, but its plans for a new digital music player sounded interesting. Word was that the unnamed device could potentially have cost less than $100—and with Zing software on board, the player could have streamed music wirelessly or tunneled into a desktop music library over Wi-Fi (similar, say, to the Simplify Media app available for the iPhone/iPod Touch).

The Journal report doesn't say why Dell has (apparently) scuttled its MP3 player plans, but with the economy taking a nosedive, I'm guessing company execs are dumping risky R&D projects and sticking with their bread and butter. Hard to argue with that.

Related:
Dell Lags in New Products [Wall Street Journal]