The Wall St. Journal says that Dell, the computer maker, is coming up with a new, as-yet-unnamed, competitor to the iPod.

In recent months, Dell has been testing a digital music player that could go on sale as early as September, said several Dell officials. […]

Instead of simply selling a piece of hardware tied to someone else’s music service, as it did in 2003, Dell is working on software for a range of portable PCs that will let users download and organize music and movies from various online sources.

The music player Dell has been testing — the product’s name couldn’t be learned — features a small navigation screen and basic button controls to scroll through music play lists. It would connect to online music services via a Wi-Fi Internet connection, and Dell executives said they would likely price the model currently being tested at less than $100.

The company’s plan, as you can glean from that somewhat unclear description, is something more elaborate than the iPod, apparently, though even after reading the story a couple of times I’m not really sure what it is, though it involves a new subscription service. And the price seems, uh, unrealistically low. (The story doesn’t say how big its storage capacity will be, or whether it will use a hard drive or flash memory.)

For the sake of the argument, let’s just assume that this will be another sacrificial lamb to the angry god Jobs. But the story got me thinking of what would be an iPod killer. In other words, in what way is Apple vulnerable, or, conversely, what doesn’t the iPod do that it should?

The only thing I can think of is something the Zune does, but badly—and that’s the ability to beam songs between units.

Now, that is an iPod-killer app.

I assume that the music and film industries, if they heard that the product could exchange files in this fashion, would refuse to license their songs to the Dell service, or even allow another, like Rhapsody, to be compatible with the device.

So that’s a no-go. But, of course, lacking a killer app, the new Dell machine is going to go nowhere anyway.

Here’s a plan, however, that might work. Jettison the music store. Market the thing, in its first iteration, as a camera ‘n’ music device. Make a big deal about the ability to wirelessly exchange photos; program the software to be ultra fast and easy to use. Prepare commercials showing hep kids taking each other’s pix and beaming them to each other.

Don’t say a word about the thing’s ability to do the same thing with music, but include a similarly fast and facile iTunes-like music program. The music industry will howl when the device is released. That’s your initial publicity campaign—the MP3 player the record labels don’t want you to have!