For Part – 1 of the review, please click here
The player is really small. Well not as small as the shuffle, but small enough to be carried out on workouts. It is large enough to be noticed and turn a few heads…
Very simple design is what pulled me to the player in the first place. It has a metal ring on top and a 3.5mm jack at the bottom. On on side it has a power button with FwD and PREV buttons and the other side has SHUFFLE/EQ button with VOL+ and VOL-. All functionalities of the player are managed by these 6 buttons. And the location of the buttons ensure that there is no accidental pressing.
Click Image to enlarge
Operation is simple – press the power button and music starts. press it again and it stops (pauses actually, which means the next time you turn it on, it resumes from where you left it last). Press the FWD or PREV button fast to change tracks. Keep them pressed and release them to forward or advance the current track.
The SHUFFLE/EQ button is a nice thing too. Keep it pressed briefly and it toggles from normal mode to shuffle mode and another such press would do the opposite. Short presses would cycle you through the preset equalizers that are built in. There are 9 modes to choose from and this player boasts of BBE technology being built in. Cool thing is that a voice guides you on the eq setting that you are choosing.
It really is that simple. The built in ear phones are not very good. They are large and not very comfortable to wear. So I suggest you upgrade the earphones to in-ear type to truly appreciate the audio quality of iAudio/Cowon players. BBE enhancements for bass etc are more pronounced with good quality earphones.
One of the gripes with this product which many had pointed out was that there was no ability to skip folders. So if you have 500 songs in the player, you have to go from song to song until you find the one you like. This can be negated if you carefully choose what songs you put in the player in the first place. But this still remained a problem. Remained? Yes, today when I visited the Cowon site, I found that there is a firmware upgrade available for this device which now supports folder skipping. This is an awesome update and I cant wait to get it on my new player.
Even the firmware upgrade is revolutionary. No need to install any application on your device. You just have to copy the firmware onto the device and remove the earphone. The device updates itself automatically. How cool can things get !
I am still hunting for an arm band for this player to help me better manage the cable mess. But even without it, it is simply great.
File transfer and charging is though a supplied USB – custom 3.5mm jack. USB seems to be high speed which means you dont wait for a long time to transfer the files onto the player. Only concern is that since the cable is non standard, you can pretty much box your player if you loose/damage the cable. So keep it very carefully.
If you need more information, leave your comments below. I will try and post some pictures later..
Here are the tech specs for the player:
Sound Enhancements: BBE, BBE ViVa, BBE ViVa 2, BBE Mach3Bass, BBE MP, BBE Headphone 1, BBE Headphone 2, and BBE Headphone 3
Data Transfer: MSC via 4-pole to USB cable
Battery Life: 11 Hrs. (charge time 1.5 hrs)
Audio Support: MP3, WMA, FLAC, OGG, Wav
Weight : 16.6 grams
