Cowon iAUDIO 7 Portable 8 GB MP3 Player (Red)
by Cowon
(Click here)
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: CowonBrand: iAudio
Edition: Electronics
Audio: English (Original Language)
Model: I7-08RD
Color: Red
Publisher: Cowon
Studio: Cowon
Music Label: Cowon
Product features:
- Color LCD; MP3 Player
- Picture viewer
- Movie player
- FM/Voice/Line-In Recorder
- Fatman Fatboy Speaker
- Alienware AW88HUB 2.1 Channel Portable Music Enhancement System
- Macally USB Car Charger USBCIGII
- iLuv i198BLK Black Docking Station with MP3 CD audio, & dual alarm
- iHome iHM3 Portable Speaker System for iPod and MP3 Players (Pink)
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Cowon iAUDIO 7 Portable 8 GB MP3 Player (Red)
Customer Review: Audio player of my dreams, not good for video though
Summary: 4 Stars
First off: I don't watch videos on a little portable anyway, so this review is going to be about the audio aspect of this player.
Battery life:
I FINALLY ran the battery down. 46.25 hours it took. I was playing .ogg files (which take a lot more processing to decode) and the volume was usually around 27 out of a possible 40, so you might get better battery time if you used mp3 and turned it down. This is the first player I've ever had that played so long (stuff it Creative!) and this is the first player I've ever had that the battery came so close to lasting as long as the specs said the battery should last.
Sound:
Wonderful, best I've ever found from a portable player. I have four, count them, FOUR players that don't put out much sound at all (maybe trying to claim better battery life?) In fact, the problem of too quiet portable players has led to a big market in headphone amplifiers. Just go to ebay and search for "headphone amp" and you'll see what I mean. They use cheap audio circuits and turn them down to less than full capacity so the battery will last longer..... because of course the average consumer will notice short battery life much sooner than he'll notice dodgy audio.
This is the only player I've found yet that can overpower my headphones. Truly awesome!
Interface:
Ahhh, at last a player that can play folders! The only thing I missed about my Toshiba Gigabeat was that I could point it to a folder and it would play through the subfolders in order. Ever since it died I've had to deal with substandard interfaces. The best my Creative player could do was give me All Tracks in one big honking list. With this iAudio7 I can finally set it running and leave it, and it will play through my whole collection the way I set the folders up.
The touch sensitivity is nowhere near as high as people say it is. Anyone who has ever used a laptop's mouse-touchpad will get it quickly. The swingtouch (tm?) bar is fairly simple and intuitive to use, although I do wish they had just left it straight up and down instead of angled. The settings are fairly straightforward: You can change a lot of preferences, from whether you want it to start playing from where it left off when you turn it on, to how fast you want it to go when you fast forward and rewind, to a 5-band EQ.
About connecting it to your computer: Don't bother with the disk that comes with it, you won't need it. Strictly plug-and-play. I didn't even install anything, just connected it, dumped in my music collection and it played it. Maybe with video you'll need the converter that comes with the install junk, but for audio you just dump whatever music in the music folder and go.
Tip: It plays ogg vorbis, an open-source alternative to mp3. With ogg, if you encode as mono it doubles the bitrate to keep the desired kbps setting. That means if you take a stereo file and encode it as 80kbps mono, it is actually 160kbps quality. I used this trick to get my whole 3,544 songs in under 6 gigabytes and still sounding fairly good.
Form factor:
Smaller than an Altoids tin. Smaller than my last Creative 4 gigabyte flash player (may it rust in peace.) About the size of a standard el-cheapo, AAA battery powered 1 gigabyte flash player. Feels solid. You could probably sit on it without damage, although I'm not going to risk such a good player by testing this.
The screen is small, but big enough you don't have to squint when navigating the menus. Watching a video or looking through pics would be a pain, which is the only reason I gave this 4 stars instead of five......... but hey, it's a really small player. Can't have a tiny player with a big screen, unless you put in holographics or space warp technology. :P
All around, best audio player I've ever found. Has everything I want, can last a solid week at work without recharging, doesn't have any of the things I hated about previous players. Video watchers, go get something else. Trust me, you'll ruin your eyes trying to watch videos on this thing.
Description of Cowon iAUDIO 7 Portable 8 GB MP3 Player (Red)
Ultra Portable MP3 PlayerDigital Cameras & Photo Categories