Cowon S9 16 GB Video MP3 Player with Touchscreen (Titanium Black)

While the ipod Touch has wifi and games, its audio and video quality are mediocre. If you sincerely care about your music and videos, the Cowon S9 is superb at bringing out the best of both. Cowon's legendary sound quality is as one would expect from its latest media player, but the AMOLED screen is what made me decide to purchase this over the itouch. It is 1000x more responsive than LCD and has 10,000 to 1 contrast ratio improvement, making watching videos on this thing quite amazing. Everything is very sharp and high quality videos don't blur in movement. Best of all, there's no need to spend six or seven hours converting a 2 hour movie if it's in AVI or WMV, so it's much easier to enjoy videos. If you're more into music, the S9 supports FLAC and OGG for audiophiles, allowing you to enjoy your music the way it was meant to be listened to.

The UI is not THAT clumbsy. It's not as crystal smooth as the touch, but it's much better than a lot of touchscreens IMO. The UI...Read more

Cowon is famous for it's media players. Latest in the line is this beautiful S9 Curve. The first thing I look for when I get a new player is the latest firmware. Cowon is on the ball. Version 2.05 came out before mine arrived, and I ordered mine from Jetmall.net the first day they were available in the U.S.. Version 2.06 came out 12/24. We're already up to 2.30 and the S9 just keeps getting better. I've always thought Cowon's players were bulky and not very practical or portable. The S9 changes the rules. Clearly Cowon has noticed that beautiful, innovative looks can help sell players.

What they didn't do was forget it's a media player. Music is best is class. Video is amazing shown on it's 3.3" AMOLED widescreen. Photos follow suite. If you're old enough to need reading glasses the Zoom feature makes apps with text easier to read/see with a simple slide of your finger. File format support is broad. You can drag and drop media directly onto the S9, use Windows Media...Read more

Pros:
Excellent Sound Quality
Amazing OLED screen
Infinity tweakable interface
Great codec support
Frequent firmware updates and new features provided by Cowon

Cons:
Screen difficult to read in bright direct sunlight
Default user interface can be a bit un-intuitive

Conclusion:
This is a great player. The screen is absolutely great, except in direct sunlight, which makes it pretty much unreadable. The price is great for the capacity, and the fact that you can run different user interfaces (UI) means that if you don't like the way it is by default (which isn't bad), you can just download one that you like. If you know how to program flash, you can make your own, because Cowon makes it really easy.

The greatest thing is that Cowon is constantly updating the firmware, about once a month. Each one brings new features, such as the latest (as of late July 2009) was gapless playback for many music formats...Read more