Indeed, well its a brave step, but one which may finally bring DCC to the masses, I think that having to normally buy a controller setup that may cost anything from £150 upwards on top of decoders for each of your locomotives can be a massive investment. Effectively giving the controller away free as an app is a nice idea as it not only cuts down that cost but also allows constant improvements and upgrades to be produced.
The downside is the basic decoders with bluetooth are a bit more expensive than standard budget decoders, but on the upside the sound enabled ones are considerably cheaper than non-bluetooth enabled sound decoders - most of them are well over £100 a pop. They are also going to be offering some loco's with pre-fitted decoders as well as 'DCC ready' loco's (the latter have been pretty much standard for a number of years now). For example in this years release program they are now listing a lot of the previously announced TT120 loco's with decoders fitted at a lower price than buying the loco and decoder separately. This should help sell those I would suggest...
I also forgot to mention, the other thing they've done with these new decoders is to add a socket for a 'keep alive battery' so the decoder can cope with bad power connections on rails and especially points. the battery pack is available separately. Similarly on the sound decoders there is a socket for one of these small 'sugar cube' speakers which are pretty much becoming the norm in DCC. So you can add the keep alive and/or speakers without having to resort to soldering etc...
The downside is the basic decoders with bluetooth are a bit more expensive than standard budget decoders, but on the upside the sound enabled ones are considerably cheaper than non-bluetooth enabled sound decoders - most of them are well over £100 a pop. They are also going to be offering some loco's with pre-fitted decoders as well as 'DCC ready' loco's (the latter have been pretty much standard for a number of years now). For example in this years release program they are now listing a lot of the previously announced TT120 loco's with decoders fitted at a lower price than buying the loco and decoder separately. This should help sell those I would suggest...
I also forgot to mention, the other thing they've done with these new decoders is to add a socket for a 'keep alive battery' so the decoder can cope with bad power connections on rails and especially points. the battery pack is available separately. Similarly on the sound decoders there is a socket for one of these small 'sugar cube' speakers which are pretty much becoming the norm in DCC. So you can add the keep alive and/or speakers without having to resort to soldering etc...
Happily collecting things all my life... 
(This post was last modified: 01-12-2023, 09:57 PM by Super.)
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