Cowon D2-08BL 8GB Portable Multimedia Player Black

Welcome to the world of ~$5/gallon gasoline. Goodbye car, hello public transportation!

With worsening economic conditions in my local economy, it's just not feasible to drive to work. I've picked up a bus pass and some walking shoes to help save money. Music has helped make the wait times for the bus more enjoyable, as well as the walk for the time I decide to hoof it.

I started looking for a new player after I left my old one on an airplane. I had several requirements: Long battery life, flash-memory, SD slot, PlaysForSure compatibility (I use Napster), and a good screen for watching movies. After googling a bunch of players, I came across a review of the Cowon D2 and I was sold.

I ordered from jetaudio through Amazon and received my player quickly.

Impressions:
It's ugly. This is no Jonathon Ives product. The player is credit card sized, but still manages to have a little heft and bulk and thicker than the pictures imply. Sexy is not a word I'd use, but "industrial" might be more fitting. However, I like the way it looks. It's very utilitarian and there's no gigantic scroll wheel or control pad taking space away from the screen.

The screen? It's great. It's crap in sunlight, though, just like everything else out there, and I can't wait for sunlight readable screens to become cheap enough for consumer products. I keep a few movies on it, and have no problems watching tv shows and the like. The touch screen is really cool, as well, and while you can use your fingers, I've found that using the little stylus really is more accurate for skipping through songs and makes hitting the wrong button less likely.

Firmware updates and Theming: The default "interface" is pretty darned ugly. It's functional, and that's all I can say about it. I updated my firmware from the Cowon site, and that went flawlessly, then installed a theme, and now it looks really nice. It's my understanding that Cowon updates their firmware quite regularly and it's refreshing to see a company support it's products well after the sale. From the release notes, they seem to add more functionality with each release.

PlaysForSure: It works flawlessly. There does seem to be a couple hiccups when filling up the device: 1) PFS is slow. The file transfer is fast, but I suppose something with the DRM pauses the transfer at the end before it completes. Regular MP3s and movies just zip right across in MSC mode (I assume I can do this with MTP mode, as well). 2) When uploading a ton of content to the player in MSC mode, it seems around the 4 gig mark it starts to have issues. From reading on the net, when it gets to this point, stop transfers, unplug D2 and turn it on, let the interface come up, turn it back off and plug it back in and resume your transfers. Otherwise, you will sit there all day starting/restarting files and pull your hair out from weird errors. This isn't just a Cowon problem, however, I've had issues similar with other devices.

SDHC slot: this is awesome. I have the 8 gig player, and having expansion is a god-send. I can keep my videos on a separate card and pop them in when I'm in the mood. Basically, this means I never really have to buy a bigger player, ever, just buy another SDHC card and keep going.

Battery Life: I've never run the battery out. Ever. I'm sure it'll run out eventually, especially if I play a lot of movies, but this is easily one of the better products I've ever had when it comes to batteries. I charge it via USB when I"m at work once a week or so (also while I rearrange music) and I'm good to go. It comes with a wall charger, but I've never used it. If I'm not mistaken mine came with a european adaptor, as well, which is really cool.

Headphones: they sound alright, but they have this goofy left side shorter than the right side thing going on that bothers me to no end. Not to mention the cable really isn't all that long. I generally keep my player in my back pocket (be careful, I'm afraid that you might sit wrong on the screen and crack it) or my front pocket. The front pocket in my shorts just barely gives enough clearance, but in my back pocket, if I move my head, the left bud pops out. It's irritating, but for stock ear buds, they sound pretty good. I'll be shopping for some new ones soon, though.

I've owned an iPod Nano, which was nice. I've gone through a couple cheapie PMPs (think $20-30 range) and they survived quite well. When looking for this PMP, I basically narrowed it down to the following:
Creative Zen
iRiver Clix 2
Cowon D2

My co-worker has the Zen and it's a really nice little device, with SDHC expansion (I think?), but the killer for me was the short battery life (she gets around 10-12 hours).
The iRiver Clix 2 doesn't waste much face space on interface, but gives you a gorgeous screen. But it doesn't have SDHC expansion. Pass.
The Cowon gave me all the features I needed at a very competitive price. Add in the customizable interface (flash based), it really was an easy choice that I've not regretted.

As a happy owner of a Cowon iAudio X5 I expected the D2 to be a perfect fit. Alas, I found the thing unfit for audio-book use. Here are the problems:

-- The touch-screen interface is inferior to the simple 4-way switch of the X5, requiring much more groping to navigate and more touches to bookmark.

-- Buggy: the unit froze regularly and had to be reset.

-- The 8GB unit I got initially did not fit the power plug, so I had to exchange it.

-- Having copied folders of MP3 tracks to the 8GB D2 I was unable to see track names. After spending some time with Cowon support I did a firmware upgrade for good luck and copied files again to the device, with decreased folder depth. Track names appeared.

-- At that time the 16GB unit came out, so I exchanged to that, reasoning that the company had worked out the kinks. Nope: copying MP3 tracks in folders still resulted in file names being invisible.

-- Weird initial settings: tracks show tags (say, "M" for an MP3 file) by default. You have to change settings to display file names instead. What use is that? It seems most people want to know that a track is Hamlet Act 1 Scene 1 or whatever, not that it's OGG or MP3.

Summary: an awful experience for a primarily audio-book user.

The sound is clean and undistorted, if a little underpowered. FM reception is generally very good, but is subject to occasional brief noise; recordings made from FM are high quality, but not quite audiophile.

File management is simple; simply plug it into the USB port of your Windows PC (I haven't tried with other OS's) and use Windows Explorer.

Navigating music menus is somewhat cumbersome, but not a deal breaker for me personally.

Pros: Sound quality, power output, battery life, SD card expansion
Cons: Playlist support weak, Occasional ID3 tag problems, no gapless playback

After being a slave to the iPod for many years, I felt it was time to find something better. I was getting sick of the constant reliability problems, poor craftsmanship and planned obsolescence. My search led me to the Cowon D2, which I have recommended to many of my friends, who have all picked one up after seeing mine. After mating the Cowon D2 to a set of Shure SE530s, I was in pure portable audio bliss. The player completely opens up the music to new dimensions and the main draw of this player is the sound quality. The customizable EQ was a welcome sight, coming from three busted iPods. I didn't care too much for the sound effect settings, but for lower-end earphones, they WILL help a bit. The battery life is rated at 52 hours for audio playback, but real-life usage nets closer to 30-35.

As great as this player is, there are a few problems that are worth mentioning. The playlist support is weak, as there is no .m3u support, or any other sort of playlist file support. There is a custom playlist creator within the unit, but it is cumbersome to use. The database corrupts itself when it sees some id3 tags it doesn't like, meaning your tracks won't be viewable, but not a frequent occurrence. If you have a lot of mixes that are individual files, you will have to deal with a small skip between tracks, as there is no gapless support.

Rounding out the deal is an AM/FM tuner, voice recorder, image viewer, and video playback. The image viewer allows your D2 to be a pseudo digital picture frame, as it has a slideshow function. In order to play back video files, you MUST convert them using the supplied app jetAudio, which is not a bad program in itself, but once they're converted, they play back quite nicely with no sync problems. Oh, by the way, it's touchscreen! :)

Even with it's flaws, there is no other PMP that I would want in my bag while being out and about.

This product has served me well so far, but there is one glaring weakness - it has no built in speaker. So to listen to anything on it, you have to use headphones or hook it up to a speaker.

One feature I love though is you can use it as a radio (plus the option to record).

The software does a good job of converting videos to its format.

The only other wish for this device was that it was a little bigger. But people have commented that the display is very nice for the size.

I use it to listen to watch movies and/or audios while working out - works great.