Cowon A3-80SL 80GB Portable Media Player (Silver)

I have been using this device now for a few months, preferring to wait until I'm settled in with it before I wrote a review extolling any virtues or deriding any problems.

I typically use this device while commuting to work (about a 1 hour commute, another hour to get home). Although I haven't done so yet, I would also use this while traveling to a job site.

I work as a senior software engineer for a company that does a lot of work with broadcast media, to give a little background to help you decide if I'm a moron who just can't figure out how to work with any device (let alone this one), or just someone who finds this thing challenging to use.

First, the pros:

The Cowon A3 provides a marvelous sound. I could hear nuances in the music that I missed before when I plugged this into my car's stereo. I believe the device's several pre-defined equalization settings also help tweak the sound without having to be a genius at equalization, while still granting the flexibility to equalize to your exacting specifications if desired. I doubt many players could beat this one for the sound.

I also love that this unit works with ogg vorbis files right out of the box. I don't have to install RockBox or some other 3rd party tool to enable ogg vorbis, my preferred audio encoding.

I enjoyed being able to add lyrics to my songs if I wanted, and have those lyrics play back within the device.

The video screen is very large for this kind of device, providing ample room to watch videos you could store in the thing. I created my own little animation and put it in the device, allowing me to show it to friends without having to create a DvD or force someone to download the animation or whatever.

I also like how you can customize it with your own preferred background images if you like. It comes with some nice samples to use.

Although I have not needed this, it provides interfaces for connecting to an analog television set, or a digital television set. This would be great for storing and showing home videos to family and friends.

It has a pretty good battery life. Once charged, this remains charged for a good while before I need to recharge it again.

It has several nice features built into it... too many to describe in a review like this. And the menu layout for accessing these features makes sense, and isn't overly cumbersome.

And now, some negative press:

The user interface is awkward to use sometimes. It comes with a joy-stick-like control that doubles as a button. You can easily try to move the cursor in some direction, but accidentally press the button at the same time, resulting in a mis-click. This makes working with the device while driving virtually impossible; set up your playlist and everything in advance, and just let it do its thing.

The device's interface also seems buggy. Often, I've tried to interrupt the thing while it's playing to make it do something else, but it either reacts very slowly to such requests, or it just freaks out and loses its tiny little mind. You have to coddle it, waiting very patiently for it to react to whatever you've requested, before attempting to make it do anything else. It is for this reason alone that I haven't rated the Cowon A3 better, as I feel the user interface is a very important part of the overall player. I really want to give this a better rating, for all of it's wonderful features and excellent sound, but I cannot in good conscience do so because of this awful interface. So often, I've had to reset the whole device in a desperate bid to get it to recover.

Its ability to receive FM signals, as described in other reviews here, leaves much to be desired. I live in a metropolitan area (Washington DC area, to be precise), with plenty of strong FM radio signals to receive. This device barely receives any of them, and does so with such poor quality as to be completely useless. While it's an excellent idea to provide the ability to receive FM signals, the inability to actually pick up these signals kind of defeats the purpose. If I could just add an antennae or something... ah well.

As mentioned earlier, I was able to create an animation of my own, and put it in the device. Unfortunately, you have to convert your video to something that seems kind of proprietary in order to make this work. I wish I could just render my video in ogg theora (I mean, after all, if they support ogg vorbix, why not also support ogg theora?), MPEG2 (program stream, although it would be awesome to use transport streams, too), or MPEG4 and be done with it. This is a minor complaint, honestly.

The software that comes with the package feels incomplete. By way of a specific example, I had to search online to find the software that allowed me to embed the lyrics in my music in such a way as to render them within the device. Annoyingly, the CD provides software that leads you to believe you could embed the lyrics using the software, but in fact it doesn't actually seem to work towards this purpose at all. Or, if it does, it somehow manages to defeat my efforts to make it do so.

I also found it very annoying that it doesn't seem to actually draw power from the USB connection. If you anticipate spending a long amount of time with this hooked up to your computer, you'd better use the power cord that came with it, or it'll eventually run out of power. You cannot recharge this device using USB power... you absolutely must use the power cord (which means I now have to bring yet another cord, instead of being able to simply hook this up to a plugged-in-laptop to recharge it, like I can most other devices I own).

The name 'MobileTV' seems misleading to me. This thing is only mobile in that you might record something from a television tuner for replay later. As far as I can tell, you cannot actually view broadcast television from the air without the assistance of a tuner to provide the video.

The video does not support overlaying traditional closed captioning (from line 21 video) as far as I can tell. If you're deaf, this device is useless to you, I believe.

Despite my not-so-great rating, and the many cons I've described, I really do like this device overall. I prefer it over my iPod, because the sound really is that much better, and for the commute, as long as I know what I want to listen to in advance, I can set it up, and let it ride for the full hour I'm on the road. If Cowon could fix the various user interface issues, I'd love to give it at least one more star.

As the title suggests the battery is going in my 15 month old, gen 5, 80G IPOD Classic and there's problems with the click wheel. I had numerous MP3 players before the IPOD; Creative Nomad, Creative Jukebox Zen, Archos 400 series (this was my favorite, until now,)and I switched to the IPOD because it was light, easy navigation, good sound, and nice screen, and the Itunes Music Management software worked so well. I had heard the sound was "decent" and that was good enough with my Sure E500s. But the downside, was that I travel, work across at least 1 work PC, and 2 personal ones, and it was a struggle to work with music and maintain my digital library, when I was 80% on the road and tied to an authorized PC at home. However for the aforementioned reason I went to buy a 6th generation IPOD classic; only to read in the forums that Apple dummed down the audio chip in the 6th generation, and there was poorer sound then my old one. I reviewed all the competition; and picked the Cowon A3 because; it wasn't as expensive with all the add on's and things I didn't need than the new Archos 5; it didn't have the Hard Drive noise of the new Microsoft Zune 120; it had more storage, and edged out the Creative Zen Xfi according to reviews. I will not address all the things that have positively been said about the Corwon, look at the A3 80 reviews and the A3 60. But I will address some issues others have noted. Navigation with the joystick; no big problem you get used to it quickly. Lack of ID3 tag sorting, no big deal, can easily find what I want in the folder structure on my PC and likewise on the Corwon. Heavy like a Brick, just a bit more than my 5th generatin classic, and a big improvement over my old Archos. I think it's a cool device. Old style buttons and connectors, not "sexy." Hey Baby it works! What really sold me is I went to Cowon's website and reviewed all their products, their support forum, (very few real issues,) their specs, S/N ration (87)and their 64 mw combined stereo out to drive decent headphones; their awards and legions of international users! The player is tremendous; the sound is awesome! Sceen beautiful; radio neat, and the rest, I'm sure will be equal to what others have said; bottom line is it's great for music! my main reason! And to put the music on it, all my windows music, and all my Itunes non-protected music, works instantly with just copying and pasting from my PC to the devices music folder.
And guess what, Amazon drop ships it right from the Cowon America distribution center! How fresh is that!
This wouldn't be for my wife and daughter, looking for a small simple device for exercise; but for Audiophile level use on the road and off; and to rid yourself of the chains of Apple control, Cowon's A3 is a #1, a AAAAA rated harddrive based player! And I have all the other cool feature of video, FM Radio and photos to enjow yet in the future. If you study the pricing and model release, right now, you are buying the Cowon with 80G right at the early settleing in of post release pricing, a sweetspot and a smart value. The hardware has been around for sevral years...so you know it works...and remember...you should buy this for the sound...but ditch the earphone packaged with it...and get some earphones you like to enjoy your music with; the Sure, Sennheiser, or even the $100. earphones from Bose, my daughter uses are all more than adequate choice brands.

I 've a A3 for a couple of days and after comparing it to my q5w, I prefer the A3 for a couple of reasons. First it plays my AAC music files, which I needed additional software to do that on the q5. It's lighter than than the q5, and fits in a pocket easier. It can also record my favorite TV shows to watch at a later time. The only thing the A3 needs to be perfect is bluetooth. If music is important to you I recommend the A3, for sound quality it beats my ipod hands down.

Cowon Products are great. They were years ahead of the Ipod. This gadget is neat. Beautiful color screen is 4 inchs wide and the record direct feature is flawless. I will agree with the other guy and say their service center is horrable. I had e-mailed them about a warranty and it took forever for them to get back to me. This review is not about their coustmer service. The A3 has a bunch of cool features it can pick up radio and TV signals which you can record directly to the device. It hold pictures, documents, music, video. With 80 gigs of Hard drive space you never run out of room.

If you are looking for a great product check out Cowon they are worth it. 1.6 milion color screen with HD like picture you won't want to put it down.

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.