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| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: Cowon iAUDIO 7 Portable 8 GB MP3 Player (Red) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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User Submitted Cowon iAUDIO 7 Portable 8 GB MP3 Player (Red) Reviews (cont...)Date: 2008-06-09 Audio player of my dreams, not good for video though First off: I don't watch videos on a little portable anyway, so this review is going to be about the audio aspect of this player. Battery life: I FINALLY ran the battery down. 46.25 hours it took. I was playing .ogg files (which take a lot more processing to decode) and the volume was usually around 27 out of a possible 40, so you might get better battery time if you used mp3 and turned it down. This is the first player I've ever had that played so long (stuff it Creative!) and this is the first player I've ever had that the battery came so close to lasting as long as the specs said the battery should last. Sound: Wonderful, best I've ever found from a portable player. I have four, count them, FOUR players that don't put out much sound at all (maybe trying to claim better battery life?) In fact, the problem of too quiet portable players has led to a big market in headphone amplifiers. Just go to ebay and search for "headphone amp" and you'll see what I mean. They use cheap audio circuits and turn them down to less than full capacity so the battery will last longer..... because of course the average consumer will notice short battery life much sooner than he'll notice dodgy audio. This is the only player I've found yet that can overpower my headphones. Truly awesome! Interface: Ahhh, at last a player that can play folders! The only thing I missed about my Toshiba Gigabeat was that I could point it to a folder and it would play through the subfolders in order. Ever since it died I've had to deal with substandard interfaces. The best my Creative player could do was give me All Tracks in one big honking list. With this iAudio7 I can finally set it running and leave it, and it will play through my whole collection the way I set the folders up. The touch sensitivity is nowhere near as high as people say it is. Anyone who has ever used a laptop's mouse-touchpad will get it quickly. The swingtouch (tm?) bar is fairly simple and intuitive to use, although I do wish they had just left it straight up and down instead of angled. The settings are fairly straightforward: You can change a lot of preferences, from whether you want it to start playing from where it left off when you turn it on, to how fast you want it to go when you fast forward and rewind, to a 5-band EQ. About connecting it to your computer: Don't bother with the disk that comes with it, you won't need it. Strictly plug-and-play. I didn't even install anything, just connected it, dumped in my music collection and it played it. Maybe with video you'll need the converter that comes with the install junk, but for audio you just dump whatever music in the music folder and go. Tip: It plays ogg vorbis, an open-source alternative to mp3. With ogg, if you encode as mono it doubles the bitrate to keep the desired kbps setting. That means if you take a stereo file and encode it as 80kbps mono, it is actually 160kbps quality. I used this trick to get my whole 3,544 songs in under 6 gigabytes and still sounding fairly good. Form factor: Smaller than an Altoids tin. Smaller than my last Creative 4 gigabyte flash player (may it rust in peace.) About the size of a standard el-cheapo, AAA battery powered 1 gigabyte flash player. Feels solid. You could probably sit on it without damage, although I'm not going to risk such a good player by testing this. The screen is small, but big enough you don't have to squint when navigating the menus. Watching a video or looking through pics would be a pain, which is the only reason I gave this 4 stars instead of five......... but hey, it's a really small player. Can't have a tiny player with a big screen, unless you put in holographics or space warp technology. :P All around, best audio player I've ever found. Has everything I want, can last a solid week at work without recharging, doesn't have any of the things I hated about previous players. Video watchers, go get something else. Trust me, you'll ruin your eyes trying to watch videos on this thing. Date: 2008-05-31 After listening to FLAC on the iAudio, I can't go back to mp3... The moment I ripped some of my CDs to FLAC and loaded them onto my Cowon iAudio7 I knew there was no going back. The sound is amazing. I can differentiate between instruments and sounds on the iAudio like I never could with my iPod. Just to make sure I wasn't imagining things, I listened to several tracks side by side with my iPod Nano and the difference is striking. It takes me back to the day I first used my Sony Walkman cassette player (yes, way back then!). I did not know what I was missing listening to mp3 all these years! The user interface is not near as nice as the iPod but it functions well enough. If you've never listened to FLAC on a portable music player, you should try it. You'll probably never look back either. Date: 2008-05-21 Underrated, the iAudio is amazing! This product is under rated. It is amazing! I have concluded from much research that this is the best product on the market, I only had a few reservations because some review sites warned that it is large and heavy. I thought it would be the size of a cell phone, but it was only slightly larger then a pack of gum and extremely light. The people filmed holding it just happen to have very small hands. I also read some complaints about how the interface "could be more intuitive", there isn't much more intuitive to get. I don't understand HOW a professional editor can complain that "I was pressing the red circle (Record), like I did in the menu, but it wouldn't actually play the song, I had to press on the Right facing triangle button/Two upward (Play/Pause) bars instead to make it play, for some reason the red circle is just for recording". - cnet review. The bottom line is, this this has an amazing list of pros, and a few made up cons because the idiots insist that there is no such thing as a perfect product... Cowon proves them wrong with the iAudio7. Date: 2008-05-14 very nice I bought this one last month. It spit out great sound and has ultra super long battery life. 60 hours with just one charge is simply amazing. Lots of features like sound enhancer, equelizer and etc.. When I see this stuff iPod seems to be so last century. Date: 2008-03-27 Poor FM Tuner I've owned iAudio 7 (8GB) just a bit more than one month. I also have iAudio U3 (2GB) and G3 (1GB). Comparing iAudio 7 with iAudio U3: Pros of iAudio 7: . Sound quality slightly better. (Sound quality of U3 has been very good.) . Display a bit bigger and better. . Much longer battery time. Cons of iAudio 7: . Navigator switch - too sensitive, even with the new firmware ver. 1.17 and setting to low sensitivity, and personally I think it's as convenient as that of U3. . Very poor FM tuner - not sure if only my iAudio 7 has a bad FM tuner or software problem - all stereo FM broadcasts were played mono. I've checked the region and stereo/mono settings are correct. U3 and G3 do not have this problem. (Would someone please share with me experience of stereo FM reception on iAudio 7?) One comment about technical support from Cowon. Their response is quick - within one day after I submitted a ticket. However, the support quality at time would be questionable. For instance, I report fault about my iAudio 7 player playing all stereo FM in mono. The immediate rely from them was questioning whether I had actually meant one side of the earphone did not have sound!
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