Dell turns up volume on music, games

In an effort to beef up its portfolio of products for the home market, Dell on Thursday announced four new additions to its mobile-entertainment lineup.

The traditionally business-focused computer maker announced new game and entertainment notebooks, a music player with room to store up to 15,000 songs and a portable digital projector. The new products allow Dell to take advantage of major trends in the consumer technology market, specifically around digital-media players and video games, and combine them with the ever-popular theme of totability.

"We want to meet the consumer's needs," for playing digital media on the go, said Gretchen Miller, director of mobile marketing at Dell.

Dell's latest game notebook, the Inspiron XPS Gen 2, was made available Thursday for $2,749 and targets the high end of the game market. The Gen 2 comes with a 17-inch display, a 256MB Nvidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra graphics card, Windows XP Home Edition and Intel's 2GHz Pentium M processor. The Gen 2 weighs 8.6 pounds, according to Dell.

The company also announced the 7.9-pound Inspiron 9300 notebook, which will be available in March. The $1,599 notebook focuses on entertainment and comes with a 17-inch screen, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Intel's 2.1GHz Pentium M chip, USB 2.0 TV tuner options and multiple ports for connecting video and audio devices.

Dell formally announced the $299 Dell Digital Jukebox 30GB, a digital audio player that has been previously reported. It comes with a 30GB hard drive and will support Microsoft's Media DRM 10 and PlaysForSure software starting in March. The device can connect to music subscription services such as Napster to Go.

The company's latest projector, the $849 Dell 1100MP, will also be available in March and will weigh 4.9 pounds. It will project images at up to 1,400 lumens and come with component HDTV, S-Video and composite video inputs.