Cowon D2 16GB review

The Cowon D2 is a neat little media player for music, photos and video.

It has an FM radio built in, too, plus a microphone for recording notes and meetings, yet the whole package isn't much bigger than a box of standard matches. The bright little 2.5 inch colour screen looks huge compared to the size of the player, and there's a generous 16GB of onboard memory plus an SD card slot that makes it easy to add more.

As you'll see from the picture, however, what the D2 lacks is buttons. There's a power switch on the top, plus volume and menu switches, but everything else is done by touching the screen. If you think that sounds fiddly with such a small screen, you're right. When you're playing music, the display is filled with information - not just the name of your track, but equaliser settings, details of how the track was encoded and so forth. Tap the screen and the main controls appear overlaid on this, with four small buttons at the bottom opening up yet further options for playlists, EQ settings and so on. Frankly, it's overcomplicated.

Still, the sound quality is excellent, and video quality is good too - scenes look colourful and beautifully clear, despite the small size. The D2 doesn't support all video formats: if you want something that'll play any file you throw at it, a Creative or Archos device might be a better bet. But Cowon's easy-to-use conversion software will turn almost any video file into a D2-friendly AVI or WMV file; on a modern PC it can transcode an hour of video in under half an hour. And shrinking footage down to fit the screen is a great space saver, so the D2's 16GB memory will hold over 60 hours of movies.

The small screen is also good for battery life. Cowon promises ten hours of video and an amazing 52 hours of music. If you can live with the fiddly interface, and don't mind having to convert your videos, the D2 is a very capable, and highly portable, box of tricks - and significantly cheaper than an iPod touch.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith