Cowon A2
Happy Birthday to me — well almost. In a few days time I hit 35 and decided to treat myself with a great gadget called the Cowon A2. Some of my family and friends also decided to pitch in for it so that was nice.
So why the A2 and not an iPod, PSP, Zen or Achios?
That’s easy! Check out the feature list:
- 4-inch, 16 million color, 480×272-pixel wide-screen display
- 10 hours of video and 18 hours of audio playback, full recharge in 5 hours
- MP3/WMA/WAV/OGG music player plus FM radio
- DivX/XviD/WMV/MPEG codecs to allow the video player to play all forms for AVI, WMV, ASF and MPEG
- JPG/BMP/PNG picture viewer
- Voice and line-in recorder as well as line out (AV out) playback
- Text file reader and proprietary file format reader
- PVR to record TV programming directly from your foxtel box or TV!!
- Powerful Sound Enhancement including BBE, Mach3Bass MP Enhance, 3d Surround and EQ
- Portable USB disk ability plus a “USB HOST” feature that allows you to transfer pictures from your digital camera (with UMS support) to your A2 without computer.
- Easily upgradeable firmware
- A clock that allows scheduled recordings and alarm clock features
Out of the box, it comes with all of the necessary USB cables, charger, headphones, leather case, manual and CD for additional software such as JetAudio. After the initial charge of 10 hours, I uploaded some music I had ripped from one of my CD’s and a 30 minute AVI file of a recent TV documentary. All I can say is wow! The audio quality is amazing and the picture quality is sharp, clear and bright. My only ‘issues’ are that the unit requires the leather case for it to have a kickstand as one is not built in and you cannot remove the battery easily, but I would still recommend the A2 to anyone wanting a portable multimedia player over the iPod, PSP, Zen or Archios.