iAUDIO I7-16RD 16GB Portable Multimedia Player Red

I enjoy the iAudio very much. The sound quality with a good set of headphones is excellent. I like the feature where you can record with line in. The only item I wish it would include is being Audible capable so I can listen to audible books.

Purchased this mp3 player about 5 months ago, have had absolutely no problems what so ever. Great sound, excellent battery life. The player itself is very small so its great for use at the gym.

Like Stephen Hawking, this player is brilliant but trapped in an uncooperative body. The ONLY reason to buy this player is for the unreal battery life. If you're someone that needs to be untethered as much as possible, this is the player to have. Short of a player that uses disposable batteries, the iAudio7 is in a class of it's own. The manufacturer claims the battery life to be 50-60 hours (Cowon says both in it's literature). Real-world battery life is 40+ in my experience. This includes fast forwarding, navigation, turning on and off, loading and removing files and so on. The sound quality is excellent and overall fit and finish is very good. It supports a number of formats including video formats. Now the downside. As good as this player is, the user-interface is far from class leading. The form factor is just too small as far as I'm concerned. As small as it is, it feels chunky. My daily player is an Insignia Pilot. It has 2X the surface area but is half the thickness. When the Pilot is in my pocket, it disappears. When the iAudio7 is in my pocket, I'm always aware of it. It's like a little brick. Much better to stay with a form factor like the Pilot, Nano and Zune for example that have a lot more surface area but are about half as thick. This also alows for a display human eyes can actually read without magnification. The UI is just awful. Given the size of the player, compromise is inevitable. Regardless, the designers made a few major errors in my opinion. The touch sensitive controls are too sensitive. Even with the latest firmware which was supposed to address this issue, it's far too easy to over shoot what you're doing. Small buttons or a smooth four way rocker switch (ie. the Rio Carbon) would have been a far better choice given the size of this player. Lastly, the firmware is far from intuitive. I've always been able to jump in and figure these things out quickly with little time reading. In this case, the manual is poorly translated and not entirely accurate. For example, I dare anyone to try setting a bookmark (for the first time) and/or setting a bookmark and then returning to the bookmark without at least a half hour of futzing, reading and trial and error. Bottom line: fantastic battery life, excellent format support and sound quality. Unless you absolutely need a player with this battery life, there are many better alternatives.

I'll save the `OK product' part as enough has been covered by other reviewers. So the screen of my i7 stopped working after 7 months of light use (how light? let's say 2 hours per day during the first month and 2h/week thereafter), and the RMA department tries to charge me $60 for LCD replacement. I told them it's only lightly used with care and it should fall under `normal usage', but their customer service can say nothing but `the price is not negotiable'.

I didn't say poor product quality, since this could have happened to anyone and I just got `lucky', but $60 for that *tiny* lcd screen? and it's not even a touch screen! are you kidding me? For twice that much I get a decent 19in LCD monitor!

Before pulling the trigger last year (and btw I paid premium when it's just out,~$270), I've been hearing a lot about this cowon-having-no-customer-service thing. But the hype of it being audiophile lured me into it. With hindsight, it won't get that much head time for true audiophiles (no s/pdif and such), and that little advantage in sound quality, if real, just doesn't worth the ridiculous warranty policy.

Now I'm going to pay that 60 bucks to get my dap back, but I will stay away from cowon products in the future. Damn!

This player is awesome. After reading other reviews I was worried about the "strange" controls. The controls are different and take a little while to get used to, but work great once you make the adjustment. I did upgrade the firmware before I started to use this player, and I did not see most of the issues brought up in other reviews. This was very easy to do, and it was even possible to do from Linux. Copy the new firmware file(s) onto the root of the player and then reboot the player. The only negative thing I can say about this player is that it does have a slow transfer speed. I think that this may be due to that fact that it is a 12 Gig FAT formatted drive. Once the files are loaded onto the device it works great and I am amazed at how long I can go between charges. I highly recommend this player. I have owned a Vibez (this is a very good player), and my wife owned an ipod, and now owns a Samsung MP3 player. The iaudio is easily the best player I have used.

I have found a second negative about this player. The resume function gets messed up if you add or remove files from the player even if they are in no way related to the file(s) you are listening to.