Cowon A2 20 GB Portable Multimedia Player

• 20 GB multimedia jukebox plays and records music and video; 4-inch widescreen LCD
• Compatibility with wide range of audio, video, still image, and text file formats
• Record video from camcorder, TV sources; programmable PVR function for television programming
• FM tuner with record capability and voice recorder; line-in recording to MP3
• Internal rechargeable battery; compatible with Windows operating systems

I dare say the build quality of this device rivals Apple's products' build quality. This is saying a lot coming from a lifetime Apple fan.

It is mass-storage compliant, so it mounts like a disk and is super easy to load up.

The interface is a pleasure to use, and firmware updates are frequent and easy to install.

The screen is delicious.

It even comes with a nice leather case. wow.

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OVERAL IMPRESSION:

STURDY, designed to last, beautiful. It has two speakers (stereo audio) and a MIC.

It has a very nice interface, responsive, and it multitasks (you can read a doc, while listening to an mp3 or the radio, or you can even be watching a movie, if you set the DOC's Viewer background color to transparent (heh I doubt it would be practical to read while watching ... but it can be done).

Battery life is astonishing... IN EXCESS than 10 hours of video watching !!

COWON people are baking new firmwares each week ! This alone is quite nice!. They are adding functionalities on every release. THIS DOES NOT MEANS that the A2 is mangled and is being fixed along each firmware update. NOPE ... it is working like a charm... but they are EXTENDING the features list.

For example: Last firmware, among other things, added slow / fast motion in movies and music ! So you can slow down action in a movie, or slow down an mp3.

VIDEO:

1) I throw inside this beauty all kinds of video files. They play FLAWLESSLY.

2) Picture size can be set up on the fly, for 4:3, 16:9 or AUTO, and then you can finetune it with PAN AND SCAN (which it actually means you can zoom inside the video, thus eliminating any black borders).

3) Screen quality and framerate is top notch.

4) Subtitles ! It support SMI format only, but there is a freeware software that allows you to convert SRT into SMI. After placing the subtitles file, you can turn it on, double its size, change color, SYNC IT (you can move your subtitles in time, in the event that they originally do not correspond to the spoken words)

AUDIO:

1) You can set up your own equalizer or choose among preset ones. You have several custom COWON music shapers, like BBE, mp3 Enhancing, 3D, Bass, etc. That actually shape the music in a good way (it is not a cheap echoing effects collection).

PICTURES: You can see your photos and pics, placing music on the background (radio, mp3) ... you can zoom over them.

RADIO: It has FM radio, quite usable.

DOCS: You can only read TXT docs ... this actually is not that good. BUt it may change in a future firmware upgrade.

RECORDING: It can record from the built in MIC, RADIO. It has AUDIO AND VIDEO LINE IN AND LINE OUT. You can SCHEDULE recordings from ANY source for ANY window time. If it is off, when a scheduled recording starts, it TURNS ON and records.

CONS: The only con I can find, is that it does not detect PAL N TV NORM, thus it records in black and white, in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

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Just got this yesterday, overall impressions are good, the best part in my opinion is the fact that my computer sees it as a drive and I can transfer whatever I want to and FROM it, unlike the iPod, which won't let me put my stuff back on the computer from it. I pretty much backed up all my must have program setup files, a few text files, 1200 songs, 500 pictures, and 2 movies, and haven't even used 1/2 the space on it.

Sound is great, even with the included headphones, or on a cassette adapter in the car, although the speakers themselves aren't that great, but what do you expect from speakers that small?

It plays OGG files, and is Linux-friendly.

I actually didn't buy it to watch movies on, but the price wasn't that much higher than the X5, so I couldn't resist. So far I have tried 2: one which I converted to avi on the computer, works great, and one that I just taped from the VCR straight to the A2, and both are good pictures and sound, I'm not that much of a movie fanatic, so I think I'll probably just go the straight from VCR or DVD player to A2 route from now on, it's easier and quicker, and the only time I'll probably use it to watch the movies are for the kids in the car, anyway.

It comes with everything you need! If you have an iPod, you will appreciate this. I can voice record and play FM radio straight out of the box (you need the headphones for FM, they act as the antenna). I can charge it either with the USB cable or the INCLUDED AC Charger. It comes with a headphone-jack to headphone-jack wire so I can record from my iPod or portable CD player. It comes with a AV cable to hook it up to the stereo or TV, so you can record from them onto it, or play it on them. and it comes with a USB host cable, so you can transfer from your camera or camcorder or whatever directly to your A2. I wish I had this before I bought all those XD cards, I wouldn't have needed tham!

I would personally have given this about 4 1/2 stars, but there is no option for that. The reason for that instead of five is:

Music browsing is file and folder based. I would like to be able to browse by ID3 tags, but they come out with firmware constantly with new features all the time, so hopefully there will be that feature soon.

I personally like the drag-and-drop file transfer, but I know that some people actually like the iTunes way, so if they would integrate a file transfer into the jukebox program, that would probably be good for those people.

I would definately recommend this!!

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I love my new PMP, ilove it, love it, so much. it works exactly as it says y the desctription, but one thing I didn't like was that they say in their web page that the cowon A2 is MacOsX compatible, and ithis is only for transferig files betwen your computer an the Cowaon A2, but the software included is not compatible, and that software is very usefull to convert video files that I download from the internet and are not compatible ith the Cowon A2 codecs, also this software can integrate subtitles to video and that is very usefull to me because as you can notice my first langage in not English

Also I can say that some times y get my video freeze but I think that the file that is not good.

I aplogize for my english, and Hope this review is useful to someone.

For the hackers in the house, Cowon has made the source code for the firmware for this puppy available. That's pretty awesome! Even if you're not a hacker, this means that you'll probably be able to get cool 3'rd-party hacks and tweaks in the near future.

Details here:

http://www.dapreview.net/comment.php?comment.news.3012