Cowon D2 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black)

An audiophile's delight. paired with Sennheiser's CX300s I have enjoyed a few hundred hours of music on this unit - VERY happy with the sound it produces. Kinda has some issues with firmware (difficulty with playlists) but overall is user-friendly and easily navigated. Hopefully Cowon will straighten out their interface or Rockbox will be released soon - even if they don't I'm happy to have it.
Also bought a Noreve case to go with - sleek little package that I have dropped while bicycling - NO DAMAGE!!!!

This is an AMAZING device...simply no words to describe how great this digital player is. I had a Cowon X5 for about 4 years until its battery started to last only 30 minutes (this is an innate flaw with lithium ion batteries not a fault of the device itself, it was still running smooth after all that time!).

So I stay loyal to Cowon, and they have rewarded us with this gem.

Pros:

-Cowon still produces (along with Sony) the best sounding music players. The JetEffect enhancements rival my Creative sound card.
-Touch screen will be a love/hate affair for people...I LOVE it.
-Video is great and works wonderfully. Won't be watching Lord of the Rings on it, but its nice to have for long plane rides.
-Picture viewing couldn't be better. Forget your phone for showing pictures.
-FM radio
-Voice/line in recording
-SD Card for additional storage (in theory unlimited)
-SMALL! I couldn't believe how tiny this thing is.
-Battery LIFE. I don't know what drugs Cowon put this thing on, but it will last FOREVER without charging. Of course I'm comparing to a 4 year old X5 which barely turned on before it lost battery life.
-Many more to name here!

Cons:

-Interface when finding music can be tricky, but I'v only had it a few hours so might be a learning curve.
-Only 4 GB of internal memory. For me this isn't a con, but some people will complain of the need to use SD cards to add more. But considering how small the thing is...
-No wifi/bluetooth...but what player has this now?
-Really nothing else.

150 dollars. Get this player.

The touch screen is great, and, while I don't use the stylus, it's nice to know I have it (I haven't taken the plastic off of the screen yet, but once I do, I know I'll smudge it without that stylus.) The USB charger is great, although I haven't had to charge it yet in the first week. The 4 gigs of space isn't as much as I'd hoped, but I plan to purchase a few SD cards to make up for it (which it supports). Definitely worth it's price. No problems with it at all, except there's no way to store the stylus on the device. I've knotted mine to the headphone wire, which isn't desirable.

I have been thoroughly disappointed with their products and lack of customer service. They average about 2-3 weeks to return an email for customer service issues. I finally got through to a representative and was advised to send the product back to them, at my own expense and they emailed back about 1 month later stating that there is no problem with the item. When I emailed back with a detailed description of the specific situation I encountered (item stopped powering on or charging through the USB port) they ceased communication. I still haven't heard back from them, but will never buy their products ever again. They are terrible both at manufacturing and caring for their customers.

Ok, first of all, this DAP is intended primarily for a situation where you can sit down with it. I tried it for a while in my car and regretted it. The interface is strongly oriented towards a usage where you can concentrate on what you're doing -- and it is good at that. Now that I learned that lesson, my old iAudio U3 is permanently in my car and I don't regret never taking it out for even a moment.

What I've always loved about Cowon's more recent players is they strive to provide more than they have to. They offer FLAC and OGG Vorbis support in most if not all of their modern players as an excellent example of this. Support for neither of these will be found in most of the players you'll find in your local department stores and needless to say, the only way you could get an iPod to do it is to put RockBox on it -- which you can't even do with modern iPods yet anyway since Apple keeps making fundamental changes that have little real value to the end user but which throw off any attempts at "hacking" the iPod. In fact, one of their most recent changes was to remove the Wolfson DACs as the company has been going through some troubles recently. And on that subject, the D2 uses a Wolfson DAC and it shows. I immediately noticed when I got this how much better it sounded than my PC's rather expensive soundcard (don't buy Creative btw. They don't care about sound quality as much as gimicks like EAX -- essentially they are the Bose of the soundcard world.) Note that if you like your sound to be colored (eg more bass and less treble, more or less seperation, or etc) then the stock settings won't appeal to you, so don't judge it by this. The settings can be changed though and I guarantee that with all of the options it offers you can find a setting that suits you.

Another great feature of this product is the support. Cowon actually does an amazing job of supporting their players and part of why these cost just a little bit more than they absolutely have to hardware wise is because you also have paid for a team who releases updates on a regular basis trying to improve every little detail that they can. Some firmwares are imperfect though, so you may need to update to the latest when getting a Cowon product. (This is just a nature of the process that frequent updates will allow some issues to creep in, so have a bit of patience if the stock firmware doesn't suit you and ultimately you won't regret it.) This player is actually an excellent example as the original hardware actually did not support SDHC. Cowon managed to add support for it via firmware at a later date (though it is unlikely you can buy one anymore with such an old firmware.) Though, with that being said, RockBox will probably officially support the D2 someday down the road (there is already work in this direction and it is currently possible to boot up an alpha version that can't do much on the D2 already.)

Besides the "software" aspect of it though, I'm finding the hardware to be quite nice as well. Firstly, the screen simply blew me away. I was using a PDA for quite a lot of tasks when I got this player and while I didn't expect much, I was still shocked to see how much better videos and images looked on my D2. I have actually watched whole videos (complete with readable subtitles!) on the D2 and it never ceases to amaze me how clear the screen is with excellent colors. It's officially classified as a PMP rather than a DAP, but you probably won't want to watch movies unless you have pretty good eyesight and there are still much better products for that task, but, it is a very nice bonus (especially if you have music videos in your collection -- this gives you a good excuse to use that SDHC slot...)

Also, the build quality is surprisingly good. It feels very tough and sturdy to me with a thick strong plastic. I've dropped it a few times and no damage has occured. However, most of the time I do carry it in a case and I do recommend this as the screen is still scratchable (and definitely use a screen protector -- it should come with one so you should be ok there -- but of course screen protectors are 10x easier to scratch due to having such a low hardness compared to the LCD's screen.)

The only single con I can come up with when I rack my brain to find something to complain about is the interface. As I said earlier, it's terrible for use in a car. But this wasn't what it was intended for (lol, who puts a Wolfson DAC in something to be played in the worst sound environment there is after all?) The touch screen interface may remind you of something recent (though the iPhone/iPod Touch was made long after the D2 I might add!) by Apple, but it's not quite as refined. In particular, it is not optimized for use with one's fingers. The D2 comes with a stylus that also acts as a stand, so I just carry this around with it. There is a little stretch cord that came with either the D2 or the case I put it in (I forget which) so I just tied one end of that to the hole in the stylus and the other in the hole it goes into on the D2. This makes it hold tighter in the D2 when I'm using it as a stand so it can't slip loose at all and it makes it always there with the D2, thus solving the interface problems handily IMO. Also, you can set it so that when you slide the lock on the volume controls can do something different like forward/back on the tracks. I find that thanks to that I often can do completely without the stylus even.

Oh, and this isn't important in a DAP, but its internal flash memory is EXTREMELY fast. Probably on the level of a really good Compact Flash card rather than a really high end SD card. While this doesn't matter when playing music, it is nice to be able to transfer quickly since flash memory can be rather slow all too often. Also, you don't need a seperate SDHC card reader as it will show up as two UMS drives on your PC, one for internal memory and the other for the memory card slot (though some may still like the convenience of a seperate reader.)

Also, the battery lifetime is every bit as good as they say it is. Well, I haven't tested and real life may be less than 10 hours, but I can say that I charge my D2 maybe once every two weeks. (Mind you, most of my listening is at home, but I think my IEMs are still pretty hungry for IEMs rated at only 16 ohms, so I'm pushing it a little bit certainly as I find myself using not much less volume than my 32 ohm headphones at home...) Oh, and on that subject, the D2 is officially rated at something like 40mW output per channel (though I think this was later revised to 37mW) which is an amazing level of output. It actually can drive my Grado SR60s and Denon AH-D1001S headphones surprisingly well (though I feel like the Grados really seem to want more power despite also being 32 ohms.) An amp is still an improvement, but it is anything but required for use with lower impedence quality headsets and IEMs. Very convenient when on the go as nothing is more annoying than finding a volume ceiling well below a good comfortable listening volume...

Overall, I must say that for its price and size this player is nearly impossible to beat. I do recommend getting the 8GB or even soon to be out (if not already) 16GB models, but that SDHC card slot will expand whatever you get up to a theoretical maximum of 32GB (assuming SDHC 2.0 or whatever they call it whenever they decide to make it isn't just simply a removal of the arbitrary 32GB limitation the SD group placed on the SDHC standard but actually makes major changes as SDHC did to SD. Otherwise it may be that larger cards will one day work as well...) Other than that, I must say this player is among the best choices in flash based players that will easily fit into a pocket. I would recommend it over similarly priced but far more limited iPods any day (seriously, what is the deal with holding out on the old software controlled method everyone dumped back in 2000 or so when UMS became standard? The iPod is 8+ years out of date and counting. With this player, just drag the music files over and your done. Better yet, set your CD ripping program -- I STRONGLY recommend Exact Audio Copy for this -- to rip directly to the D2 and you don't even have to bother dragging and dropping...)

PS. Be sure to check out iaudiophile.net. They like to provide a LOT of information on Cowon's products. You can usually find the latest firmwares on there before they even get released in the west (there isn't really any important difference, it just takes things a while to get from Cowon International to Cowon of America) and you'll find help for any questions about their products in the forums as well as various reviews (including one for the D2 of course) on the main site. A must for Cowon users and those thinking about them I think.