Gadgets: Cowon A3 Portable Media Player – 70

With the falling costs of solid-state memory, hard drive-based media players are already becoming few and far between. The Cowon A3 is one notable exception, offering 60GB of good old-fashioned hard drive storage in a similarly old-fashioned form factor. The A3 is thick and, at 280 grams, decidedly the heaviest handheld device I’ve reviewed for Tone. What exactly did Cowon pack into the A3 to make it weigh 280 grams? Pretty much everything.

Want an MP3 player with support for MP3, WMA and more or less every other format you can think of? The Cowon A3 has one and it sounds good. Unfortunately, playlist support is rather limited, so if you like to have a soundtrack queued up for every possible occasion you’re out of luck. Given the sheer range of features available this seems like a rather obvious omission.

An FM radio is included and has brilliant reception. I recorded a few songs to WMA files and the quality was comparable to that of commercial downloads. Voice recording is also supported.

The Cowon A3 provides photo and document viewers for a wide range of formats. This is a very nice touch as the 4-inch, 800 x 480 display is brilliantly sharp and great for showing off photographs or reading screeds of text.

Where the A3 really shines, though, is its video player. Take that big, beautiful screen, add support for high-definition video and you’ve got a definite winner. If you prefer your moving pictures fresh off the feed, a digital TV receiver compatible with New Zealand’s Freeview will soon be available for $99. In the meantime you can grab video straight from any composite or S-Video source with the included cables.

If you’ve got a big-screen television or projector on hand, the same cables can be used to output audio and composite, component or S-Video. Because the Cowon A3 plays a ridiculously wide range of video formats, you can take a downloaded or captured video and play it on the big screen straight away without having to burn a DVD or go through a time-consuming conversion process.

PC connectivity is provided via a standard mini USB cable. The player’s hard drive appears as a USB mass storage device, so no special software is required. Using the included adapter cable, the same USB port can host other mass storage devices such as USB drives, MP3 players, PDAs and digital cameras – great for transferring media to a smaller device or archiving photos to make space on your camera’s memory card.

The more I hold the Cowon A3 in my hands, the lighter it seems weighed against its tremendous range of features. If you’re looking for a powerful video-centric device that records as well as it plays, I can’t imagine a much better option.

HARLEY OGIER

Say Goodbye to the VCR

The Cowon A3 supports video recording at the press of a button or on schedule. With the optional Freeview Mobile TV receiver, you’re free to say goodbye to your ageing VCR or overly complex DVD recorder. Setting up a schedule is quick and easy, no longer the punch line in an anti-technology joke. Radio recording can be scheduled in the same way – great if you’re a talkback junkie or just prefer your news in audio form. When you start to run low on storage space, just move your recordings to your PC’s (presumably larger) hard drive – recordings are in common formats so no special software is required.

Specifications

Storage: 60GB

Display: 4-inch, 800×480, 16 million colour TFT

Connection: USB 2.0, AV out/in, component out, S-Video out/in

Battery: Rechargeable, up to 9 hours audio, 7 hours video

Features: Audio Player: MP3, WMA, FLAC, OGG, Apple Lossless, AC3, TTA, APE, MPC, WV, PCM

Video Player: DivX, XviD, WMV, H.264, MPEG 4/1, M-JPEG

Photo Viewer: JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP, RAW

Document Viewer: PDF, Office, HTML, HWP by CSD, plain text

Recorder: Video, audio, voice, FM radio, mobile TV scheduled recording and playback Optional Mobile TV receiver

Size: 133.4 x 78.5 x 22mm

Weight: 280g

Pros

• Beautiful 4-inch screen

• Mobile TV support

• Records more or less anything

Cons

• Limited playlist support

• Thick and weighty

Verdict

The heavy artillery of media players

Contact

www.cowon.co.nz

This review is from Tone issue #70.