COWON

COWON is Coming to America with FLASH Memory

by jeff on Fri, 2008-11-07 00:30

Well, they are already here … our Summer intern did a review of the COWON D2, and I will say that it was an amazing little device. Now, the COWON O2 touch-screen portable media player (PMP) is here in time for the Holiday’s.

I would much rather have this device than an iPod. The 4.3-inch widescreen has FLASH memory that improves battery life. There is an eight-hour playback with video and 18 hours of audio. This means that you could watch 8 hours of movies before you recharge. Can you do that with your iPod?

The COWON O2 8GB, 18GB and 32GB sell for $219, $249 and $299 respectively. Each player is equipped with a memory expansion card slot supporting SD and SDHC memory cards for additional storage capacity. So you can extend your PMP FLASH memory 32GB! Here is the press release so you can see the file formats this little PMP supports.

Check out the company web site, www.cowonamerica.com

Hands On Review: COWON D2 (2GB)

The COWON D2 is the first ultra portable video player and first flash based touch screen player in its family. It has a similar appearance to the iRiver Clix, and the D2 has some significant difference under the hood: like the TV output, support lossless audio codecs like Flac and Ogg, and an SD/SDHC card slot for unlimited expansion. Recommendation- a protective case and a better set of headphones. The headphones I used along with testing the sound quality of the device are the Ultrasone HFI-2200 headphones.

Quick Overview

Audio: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, FLAC, APE, WAV, AAC (only on older firmware versions)
Video: MPEG4-SP (DivX, XviD, ...), WMV9 - 320 x 240, 30fps
Photo: JPEG (no size limit)
Screen: 2.5", 24 bit (16 million) color, 320 x 240, TFT-LCD
Dimensions: 78.0 x 55.4 x 16.6 mm (3.07 x 2.18 x 0.65 inches)
Weight: 91 g (3.21 oz)
Rated battery life: 52 hours for music, 10 hours for video
Other features: Touch screen, SD/SDHC card slot, TV-out, FM radio, voice/line-in/FM recorder, BBE sound enhancements, user-configurable effect presets, text viewer, date/ time/alarm, bookmarks, on-the-go playlist, deleting files on the player, dictionary (only with Korean firmware)