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Cowon i9 16GB review

Cowon i9 16GB
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £120
inc VAT

Cowon's gimmicky i9 isn't a bad portable audio player; it's just there are far better designed models available at similar prices.

Cowon’s i9 portable audio player is impressively light and slender, yet it has 16GB of storage and is reasonably priced. Previous Cowon players we’ve seen have had unusual controls and the i9 is no exception.

The i9 has a series of touch-sensitive buttons. Unusually, the buttons for scrolling through its menus are arranged diagonally instead of vertically. This feels odd, especially since most of the menus are still arranged vertically. They aren’t any faster or more accurate at scrolling through long lists of music than the buttons used on other MP3 players, but are easy enough to get used to.

The diagonal controls, as well as the initially perplexing appearance and arrangement of icons in some of the diagonal menus, feels like a poorly thought-out gimmick rather than a logical control system. Volume is adjusted using a dedicated pair of physical buttons, but these are located on the lower left hand edge of the player, and so aren’t very comfortable to use.

We were more impressed with the i9’s sound quality. No matter what genre we listened to, music sounded rich, clear, detailed and full of bass. You’ll need a quality, third party set of earphones to hear this quality though. The bundled set sound muddy, lack detail and have little bass.

If you tire of your own music, there’s an integrated FM radio, but finding stations using the touch sensitive buttons is fiddly and we weren’t impressed with the reception quality either. The i9’s battery lasted just under 26 hours when playing music. This is respectable, but we’ve seen similarly priced players last longer.

The small 2in screen isn’t ideal for watching video content, especially not epic movies. This is a shame since, in our tests, the battery lasted for four-and-a-half hours when playing video, which is enough for a couple of films. We had no problem playing Xvid and WMV videos; they looked bright and sharp, despite the typically low 320 x 240 screen resolution.

Cowon’s i9 is a competent enough portable audio and video player, but there’s little that make it stand out from the competition. The gimmicky controls and menus aren’t as well-designed as those on Apple’s similarly priced and sized 16GB iPod nano.

If you don’t mind a slightly heavier MP3 player, an even better choice is Philips’ 16GB GoGear Muse. Its battery lasts far longer when playing music, it has wider video format support, a bigger and higher-resolution screen to enjoy them on, built-in noise cancellation and sensible controls. It’s a far superior portable audio player.

Details

Price £120
Rating ***
Headphone Rating **

Hardware

Capacity 16.00GB
Formatted capacity 15.10GB
Interface USB2
Storage medium flash memory
Battery and charge options Lithium Polymer, USB
Size 44x43x95mmmm
Weight 40g

Features

Device has screen? Yes
Viewable size 2 in
Native resolution 320×240
Memory card support none
FM Radio yes
Audio record options microphone, radio
Video record options none
Supplied with headphones, USB cable

Test Results

Tested battery life (MP3 playback) 25h 49m
Tested battery life (Video playback) 4h 31m
500MB transfer time 1m 39s
Audio MP3 playback Yes
Audio WMA playback Yes
Audio WMA-DRM playback Yes
Audio AAC playback No
Audio Protected AAC playback No
Audio OGG playback Yes
Audio WAV playback Yes
Audio Audible playback No
Image BMP support No
Image JPEG support Yes
Image TIFF support No
Video MPEG-4 AVI playback Yes
Video MPEG-4 MP4 playback No
Video WMV playback Yes
Video MPEG-1 playback No
Video MPEG-2 playback No
Video MPEG-2 VOB playback No
Video MPEG-4 DivX/XviD support Yes
Video H.264 support No
Video MPEG-4 MP3 audio support Yes
Video MPEG-4 AAC audio support No
Download compatibility WMA-DRM subscription and download

Buying Information

Price per MB 0.7p
Warranty one year RTB
Supplier http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk
Details www.cowonglobal.com

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