New Cowon Music Player Releases :

New Cowon i9 Music Player :

Cowon i9

We are definitely excited to see some more products roll out from Cowon as the other brands have been rolling out and announcing their players for the holidays. The Cowon iAudio 9, or more commonly referred to as the Cowon i9, is the successor to the Cowon i6 and the flash version of the i6, the i7. I believe that the number 8 was skipped due to an eastern superstition. So we move right along to the new Cowon i9.

Not everything is known about this player, but from the splash page on Cowon's Korean site the player has all the great features of the Cowon family like killer support for all kinds of audio codecs and it looks like it is adding some nice support for video files too: AVI, WMV, XViD, and ASF. It also states that it supports TV-Out, which could possibly mean video playback without conversion. Additionally, it will add a built-in speaker in a tiny package (42mm x 95mm x 8.9 mm). This could make a lot of Cowon fans happy for a more compact version of the S9 they have been carrying around.

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New Cowon S9 Music Player:

One of the most anticipated players of this year is the Cowon S9. Even though the S9 is not a D2 successor it does go a big step beyond with what I think is one of the more important features, native xvid support- no conversion necessary. It does also offer a much more usable capacitance touch screen compared to the D2.

Key Features :

• Quick Look
• Dimensions: 57.0 x 105.8 x 12.7 mm
• Weight: 77.0 g
• Colors: Black/Titanium, Black/Chrome
• Capacities: 8G, 16GB
• MSRP: $200, $240
• Display: 3.3" 480x272 AMOLED 16.7m colors, Touch Capacitive
• Audio: MP3, WMA, FLAC, OGG, WAV, APE
• Video: DivX, XviD, WMV
• Photo: JPEG
• Other: TXT
• Transfer Protocol: MSC/MTP User Selectable
• Audio: 5-band EQ, BBE, Pan/Balance
• Battery: 55h Audio, 11h Video
• Other: Flash, Utilities, Bluetooth, FM, Voice Recording, Line-in Recording.

Review :

The Cowon S9 is a solid player. The capacitive screen is a big improvement over the D2’s resistance type screen. On the face of the player a beautiful looking AMOLED screen graces the front and runs among the top screens on current portable devices. The sound quality is what we would expect from Cowon, excellent. The UI is fairly smart and its obvious Cowon spent some time on this, but it may not be intuitive to US buyers. My previous worries about buggy firmware are gone, while not perfect, it is the most stable Cowon release yet- though still expect typical constant updates over the next year.

For the Cowon fan it is a must buy if you can get over the fact that there is no expansion slot. But if you are on the edge or can’t quite decide and you are eying a touch screen player, wait till late Q1 of 2009. Sony and Samsung are releasing competitive touch screen players, but also by then Cowon may have added more features and utilities. I definitely do recommend the S9, but there will be some other great choices as well. Which one is “better” will come down to your personal preference.

source :anythingbutipod