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Cowon Q5, D2 and A3 Digital Media Players
Korea-based Cowon has been making portable media devices since 2000 starting with their iAudio line. We've reviewed their products in the past and generally like what we see. I'm always interested to see what their CES booth looks like each year. For CES '07 they expanded their display a bit and even included a time line of all their models from 2000 through 2006.   Under the spotlight were the Cowon Q5, D2 and A3. The Q5 and D2 are both portable media players with impressive 5" and 4" screens, respectively. Each houses a 30 GB hard drive and a host of video playback formats. Rich and I played around with some of the movies they had pre-loaded and for the most part they looked pretty good. One of the A3s had a bit of a problem displaying Spiderman 2 and was quite jittery, but that could have been the file itself as other A3 displays had no problems.   The Cowon D2 is listed as a "premium MP3" player. This 2/4 GB flash-based MP3 player also plays videos over its 2.5" 24 bit TFT LCD screen at 30 frames per second. A touch screen interface offers intuitive navigation. But what I can't get over is the 52 hours of music playback Cowon boasts the D2 literature. Yes, 52 hours! I had to confirm this number on their website and sure enough it wasn't a typo. I'd really like to get my hands on one and test their claims. This player is loaded, really loaded, with features. It seems almost too good to be true. With an SDMMC memory card expansion slot, multi-codec support (MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV and FLAC), a TV-video out, voice recorder, photo viewing, FM tuner and recorder and MS DRM10 support it sounds like iRiver and Sandisk might have a new competitor to contend with!if Cowon can get the word out.   We walked past another Cowon device that, at first glance, resembled a cell phone. But, as it turns out, the iAudio F2 is a smaller capacity (512MB/1GB/2GB) flash player with all of the same music playback features of the D2 without the video support. Its 1.3" color screen is navigable via a simple icon-based GUI using directional buttons and is meant to be easily operated with one hand. An impressive 22 hour playback rounds out the list.   I'd like to see Cowon take off in the US. I've had my JetAudio iAudio4 for 2.5 years and never had an issue with it. It travels in my bag to and from work every day and I use it to record voice during meetings. In fact, I've been using it here at CES to record our product sessions with manufacturer reps. I hope we can get a few new Cowon samples for TheTechLounge in the near future. 
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