Cowon iAudio A3 review

Cowon's iAudio A3 is a portable media player with a 4 inch display and a 30GB hard disk built in. These relatively generous specs make it well suited to watching films on the move.

The on-screen interface is fairly easy to use. You navigate with a tiny joystick and three buttons labelled A, B and C, which have different uses depending on where you are in the menus. The fact that the buttons' functions keep changing is confusing at first, but there's always a legend displayed at the bottom of the screen. It's no harder than getting to grips with a new mobile phone.

To get your content onto the player, you simply plug it in to your PC or Mac's USB port and drag audio, video and image files into the corresponding folders on the A3's hard disk. The screen displays your files as a simple list, and can't sort your music by artist or album, so you'll have to make sure your file names are accurate and organised into folders.

The player offers support for an amazing number of audio and video formats, and managed to play every kind of test file we threw at it. We were particularly impressed with how our high-quality XviD video files appeared on the A3's screen. They played back smoothly, with vibrant colours and no visible pixels, making films look fantastic. The only problem was the quiet audio output: we had to keep the player on full volume most of the time.

The Cowon comes with composite, S-Video and component video outputs, so if you have a TV handy you should be able to connect it, though inevitably your video files won't look quite so perfect when magnified up on a big screen. It can also digitise video directly from an S-Video or composite source to its hard disk, so you could plug it into your Freeview or cable set-top box to record TV programmes, for example.

Cowon's iAudio A3 is expensive, but you may be tempted if you want a very portable device that can play all your music and video files.

Author: Chris Finnamore