Cowon iAudio S9

Prize winner!

Excellent sound and great attention to detail

eg. the front glass is Pilkington's "gorilla glass" and extremely hard, but flexible, can't scratch it with a sharp knife. Only found out from a third party; Cowon did not even mention it.

There are numerous pre-set sound features, equaliser, reverb, echo, etc. excellent battery life, good volume.

A radio with lots of pre-set stations, which can be recorded live.

large screen that is good for viewing movies, and an interface that takes a little getting used to.

Users can change the appearance, background, etc. and can play or even write their own games.

The manufacturer issues firmware updates from time to time to improve the product.

I bought the Cowan S9, following other reviews trumpeting its sound quality. Plus it looked sleek and stylish.

Nevertheless, there are some very good and very bad things about it that I think are worth passing on.

Good stuff. The sound quality is superb and the home display icons looks bright and attractive and the screen is a good size and battery life superb. Plus it has a sound recorder and FM Radio - one of the main reasons I chose this model over the Apple version.

Bad stuff. Forget about ease of use. The Cowan S9 is absolute hell to get used to. The instruction booklet is no less than useless. All it has is a few pages that highlight what the product can do - not the most important thing you'd expect in an on-sceen instruction book - details walk through on HOW to use the software as well as the accompanying media centre - Jet Audio. So when it comes to syncronising and coverting files, you pretty much have to work most of it out yourself and, believe me, it's not that easy unless you're comfortable and familiar with complex gadgetry.

The home button is also hard to find and you can find yourself playing the same album over again, not being able to figure out how to get back to the main menu choices, only the icons which, which when pressed just jumps back to the same album I was playing before. Again, a poor way of constructing an interface. There are also too many unnecessary bells and whistles which don't add value. The flip listings, for example. Do we really need to see a row of three disks that show what song you've just played and the song that's next, particuarly at the expense of really terrible instructions, which are far more important.

Overall, I would rate this player but only if you have deep pockets and good ears that demand excellent sound quality. But if ease of use is what you're after, plus a stylish product and reasonably good but not excellent sound, perhaps without a radio too, you'd probably do much better with the Ipod. It's also pretty pricey for a product that is made of plastic, has no intuitive interface and lousy instructions. Get those right and we'd be onto a real all-round winner, not robbing Peter to pay Paul.

I purchased the S9 with Shure SE530s, and the combination is quite simply exceptional. My priority with an MP3 player is sound quality, and the S9 is simply better than the ubiqitous iPod. Add in the BBE2 and other bewildering sound options and the iPod begins to look distinctly thin on features.

The user interface in the S9 isn't as slick as the iPod's, but then I suspect the priority has been sound quality.

Battery life is excellent, and you can manage your music using standard USB mass storage rather than just MTP.

A definite recommendation for the S9.

This cowon mp3 player has great sound. cowon usually has amazing sound. the amoled screen his fantastic.But its features are not up to par with ipod touch. but im sure cowon will ad more features in hte future. this mp3 player could be double price and it wound still sell. its an amazing value.

I have been researching this Cowon S9 MP3 for over 2 months now... Still good.

I have bought it and it is not easy to scratch the screen

Big LCD screen

Won 2008 Good Design Award

Stylish

4GB, 8GB, 16GB

Supports AVI