The fact that Dell has pulled out the hard drive based MP3 player market seems like yesterday's news; however, it is actually last month's news.

While Dell discontinued their Pocket Digital Jukebox players sometime in late December, early January period, over a month passed before anyone noticed and it became "news". This shows just how much interest and demand there was in these products. Much like back when Apple broke the Real Rhapsody hack that allowed them to tap in FairPlay protected content and it took over a month for anybody to notice, this only illustrates that the iPod is here to stay, and everything else seems to be pretty much negligible.

With Apple's iPod dominating the US market with a share of approximately 70 percent, and Creative and Samsung both having under ten percent each, there is little room for anybody else to do anything, and there are many in that crammed little space, including Dell.

So far, the list as long as an arm, with Olympus declaring it was getting out of the digital music player market last year, as did D&M Holdings who parented the hardware pioneer Rio, and iRiver is thought to have pulled out of the European market in the face of the cost of competing with the likes of Apple and Samsung.

Who will be next?