Cowon S9

For those of you that like your media players, then the new Cowon S9 Curve is one to check out.

The Cowon S9 has a curved backside and features a 3.3 inch color AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display with 480x272px resolution and 16m colors.AMOLED screens are capable of lighting themselves and does not require backlighting like LCD screens. The Bluetooth support is listed as A2DP and AVRCP compatible which means audio streaming and remote controlling, and no support for headset mode or file transfer is listed. The interface will auto rotate as you turn the player and be flash, so hopefully that means it's skinable right out of the box. With a 500 MHz dual core CPU it should hopefully be rather quick. It comes with 9 EQ presets and like other Cowon players it does both Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. Size wise it will be 57.08 x 105.75 x 12.7 mm

It's the video aspect of the S9 that will disappoint many people. It only plays at the screens native resolution, which is rubbish in my opinion. This is most likely to make sure such players as the O2 have a market as well, but in doing so they limited a player which could be the new big hit and native Xvid support without resolution limits would definitely help towards that. It does do WMV and AVI (prob Xvid) like the D2 and h.264 has been added as a third supported video format. This means better quality per megabyte of data, and it might mean it will play back PSP formatted video. Don't get your hopes up however as h.264 compatible portable players tend to be extremely picky on what they will play back. The video support will do the job, but it could have been soooo much better - especially since the player has TV out, a feature that was barely a novelty on the D2.

Lastly, the capacity. A lot of people have been pointing out that this thing doesn't have memory expansion, something that's become a must have after the reign of the D2. With capacities up to 16GB at release and 32GB later, it isn't ever capable of reaching the D2's 48GB combined storage space. Not to mention the 32GB version will most likely be rather expensive, maybe more than people are willing to pay.

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