(FORTUNE Magazine) – The evil scientist Lex Luthor used his duplicator ray to try to clone Superman, but something went terribly wrong. The result was Bizarro, a good-natured but ugly and backward version of the Man of Steel. Bizarro was the antithesis of cool; his home planet, Htrae, was square.

When Bizarro had good news to announce, he would say, "This am terrible!"

Which leads us into a discussion of Dell's new Bizarro version of Apple's iPod, called the Dell Digital Jukebox Music Player, or Dell DJ for short. Coming from the square world of Dell instead of the hip world of Apple, it's bigger, heavier, and clunkier than Apple's sleek, suave, elegant iPod, which arrived on the scene two years ago and quickly became the most popular portable digital music player on our home planet, Earth. Even worse, the Musicmatch-backed Dell Music Store is the clumsy, Bizarro counterpart to Apple's brilliant iTunes Music Store.

So why am the Dell DJ terrible, in the good sense of the word?

Devoted fans of Bizarro know that although he was an imperfect clone of Superman, he was still capable of the occasional superhero feat. And so it is with the Dell DJ, which has a superheroic battery capable of lasting 16 hours between charges, or twice as long as the iPod's.

On top of that, the two models of the Dell DJ are both around $100 cheaper than their iPod equivalents. The 20-gigabyte DJ costs $299, vs. $399 for the 20GB iPod. Both hold up to 5,000 songs. The 15GB DJ is $249; Apple no longer makes a 15GB iPod, but the 10GB iPod costs $299, so the price differential holds true.

The third advantage the Dell DJ has over the iPod: It was designed from the start to work with the Microsoft Windows operating system and with industry-standard USB 2.0 connection ports. (Apple has since released Windows-flavored iTunes software and an optional USB 2.0 iPod dock connector, much to the horror of Macintosh purists. However, the true glory of the iPod is revealed only when it is connected to the Apple iTunes Music Store via a Macintosh computer through a FireWire connection.) The Dell DJ's native affinity for Windows will make the PC majority quite happy.

Bizarro, the pathetic wretch, was driven mad by constant comparisons with the handsome, smart, and sexy Superman he was meant to emulate. So too must the DJ suffer from inevitable comparisons with the iPod, with its two-year headstart. If the iPod did not exist, the DJ might even lay claim to the title of Best Portable Music Player Since the Sony Walkman.

But the iPod does exist, and so do Apple iTunes and the Apple iTunes Music Store, and thus the Dell DJ is doomed to be merely the second-best player on the market.

In other words, we must praise the DJ with faint damns.

The DJ's blue, backlit screen and function keys are attractive but hardly as sexy as the red-orange glowing buttons on the newer iPods. Everybody has blue lights these days, it seems.

Much is made of the sheer simplicity of the iPod's navigation system. Actually, in many ways I like the DJ's system better. It has a clever mechanical scroll wheel--button combination that some people will like better than the solid-state scroll wheel on Apple's device. And the DJ has an ON-OFF button, something that disappears in the iPod's too-cool minimalist design. (To turn off an iPod, one has to push and hold the PLAY button. It's sort of like shutting down a Windows computer by clicking the START tab.) The other buttons on Dell's maximalist design are all clearly identified and intuitive.

Despite the DJ's obvious heft--it weighs just shy of half a pound--Dell still tries to portray it in its advertisements as "sleek" and "ultra-portable." A more honest approach would be to tout the DJ's solid feel in the hand and its ruggedness and macho silver-and-black color scheme. It's more like the Humvee of digital music players.

Well, maybe the Humvee is a bad example, since the DJ is outgunned by the iPod in other areas.

Apple already has a 40GB, 10,000-song iPod that's smaller and lighter than the 20GB Dell. (Why Dell ignored the 40GB drive offered by Hitachi, which makes the 1.8-inch hard drives used in the DJs, is a mystery--as is Dell's decision to offer two models that differ by a mere five GB.)

The DJ can be used for backing up data from the user's PC, but the iPod goes further; it can be used as a bootable hard drive. Sure, that's a geeky distinction, but it's one of the things that contributes to the iPod mystique.

The Dell supports MP3, WMA, WAV, and mono sound files. The iPod does too, plus AAC, which some consider to be a superior music-compression format.

The iPod's software enables it to store contacts, an appointment calendar, to-do lists, a clock, and games, all synced with the computer. Dell chose not to include these handy extras. However, the DJ has a built-in microphone that's useful for capturing classroom lectures and all those fascinating marketing presentations that Dell's corporate customers enjoy so much. On the iPod, voice recording requires an add-on device.

The biggest difference between the iPod and the DJ, besides the classic difference between Beauty and the Beast, is in their respective music-software services. Musicmatch is my favorite Windows-based online music service--that's like saying a prostate exam is my favorite invasive procedure--and it's at the heart of Dell's new online Music Store. Songs can be downloaded for a buck and transferred to the DJ with relative ease.

However--and who can blame Bizarro for screaming, "Yes! Keep going! I can stand it!"--Musicmatch and the Dell Music Store are simply no match for Apple's iTunes and the Apple iTunes Music Store when it comes to elegance of operation and ease of use.

Cheer up, Bizarro. With your superior battery life, lower cost, and intuitive user interface, you am definitely terrible, at least in the Windows universe.

For more tech advice, see Peter Lewis's weblog at www.fortune.com/ontech.