Gadgets: Cowon 02 Portable Music Player – Review – 75

The O2 is the latest portable music player from Cowon, a Korean company that specialises in digital audio and video. Although Cowon has been around for ages, the brand isn’t particularly well known here, but it is attracting interest because of the exceptional quality of its players.

A video/music player as well as a picture viewer/voice recorder, the O2 is a flexible unit. Freshly unpacked from its box, I was immediately impressed with its body. Minimal in design, Cowon certainly hasn’t fussed around with its appearance. It is a nice size and weight and sports a massive touchscreen, which is of course a pivotal part of its build, being a media player and all.

So how did it dance at the disco? Pretty darn well, I thought, with its overall performance very good. Importing music was a simple matter of plugging in the USB cable and dragging the songs into the player’s drive. It was the same concept with photos and video – easy.
Being an Apple Mac user, I couldn’t play my iTunes DRM-protected videos, which was a right pain in the backside but hardly Cowon’s fault. In fact, the O2 plays an impressive range of file formats, almost all of ‘em. Should you happen to possess an unsupported video file format, though, it can be made viewable after conversion at the Cowon Media Center online using the JetAudio multimedia software.
A minor grumble is the lack of auto-resume. If you are part way through a song and have to turn the unit off, it doesn’t later pick up where it left off. That’s especially annoying with videos. Nor does it create playlists, such as ‘Top 25 most played’, which is something I adore about my iPod.

Videos look awesome on the O2 and are such a delight to watch. The depth of colour and clarity is impressive given the actual LCD size. Photos look fantastic too, and can be rotated and twisted about the place using the touch functionality. As for the sound, it’s crisp and clear even with the earphones straight out of the box. I imported my new Aqualung CD, Words And Music, and was in heaven.

So with multimedia playback such an important focus, what’s the unit like to navigate? It’s kind of like the iPhone, actually. It has similarly cute and user-friendly bubble icons. Files are organised in a tree format and provided you keep your files sorted and labelled appropriately, it’s simple to navigate. The touch functionality works well, but better with the supplied stylus than a finger. This is a very impressive player, and such a pleasure to test.

JESKA INNES

TECH SPECS

O2

Portable Music Player
$599

CAPACITY: 16GB (expandable with SD/SDHC card)
SUPPORTED FILE FORMATS:
Video: AVI, WMV, ASF, MP4, MKV, OGM, MPG/MPEG, DAT, MTV
Audio: MP3, WMA, ASF, FLAC, OGG, M4A, MKA, TTA, APE, MPC, WV, WAV
BATTERY LIFE: 8 hours video/18 hours music

GENERAL FEATURES:

• 4.3-inch LCD touchscreen

• 10-band EQ + EQ Filter

• Picture viewer

• Text viewer

• Document viewer

• Voice recorder

• AV out, USB

SIZE: 73 x 119 x 18 mm (L/W/H)
WEIGHT: 205g

CONTACT:

www.cowon.co.nz
www.digitalpride.co.nz

PROS

• Sounds great

• Looks great

• Is great

CONS

• Where’s the auto resume?

• No playlists

VERDICT

• I like this PMP a lot

This Review is from Tone Issue 75.