Product Description
Cowon always tries to forecast and understand what the market and customers want. Cowon believes that the customers should be satisfied with the best-quality products, and this is the key to the company's success that drives creative research and development without failure.
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iAudio F1 1 GB Black Turbo MP3 Player
- Electronics: 0 pages
- Publisher: Cowon
- Label: Cowon
- Studio: Cowon
- Average Customer Review:
 based on 3 reviews
- Sales Rank in Electronics: #47288
Avg. Customer Review:
5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not for audiobooks! 2006-01-13
Comment: This is a very nice little player, well-made and good sound quality. I really like it, and would give it 5 stars...except:
It is useless for Windows media (WMA) protected files such as audio books. It plays them fine, but the trouble is that the "resume" feature and the bookmark feature don't work with these files. So you shut it off, and the book starts again. These are one large file, so you have to skip in maximum 30-second jumps to your spot, if you can remember where you were by the time you get there (2-3 hours at 30 seconds per jump?).
The timer, to top it off, doesn't work with these files either, so you haven't a clue where you were unless you look at your watch when you start the book. There is no way to mark or return to your place. Pause the playback, and it powers off automatically in a short time...oops, lost your place, start over.
The resume feature works fine with normal mp3 files. I actually do like this player, and have tried (tried, not succeeded) to contact Cowon support to see if they're going to fix this soon with a firmware update...otherwise, I'm afraid it's useless for most of my purposes.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: vroom vroom oof 2006-01-11
Comment: I was planning to buy an iAudio X5 but in the end I didn't have enough money. What I did have was a strong desire to get an mp3 player and a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate that I got for Christmas so I decided to get this.
I've had it for about a week now so I think that I have a good enough feel for it to write a review based on my opinion. To summarize for those that are in a hurry, the player works great and the only minor issues for me are the battery life and the charge method but in the end you're probably better off getting one of Cowon's other models. I certainly plan on buying from Cowon again based on the quality of this player, but I think I'll wait until they release their next generation of products (an X6 maybe?).
To run over it in more detail, the unit is about as full featured audio wise as can be. It even has line-in and voice recording which was nice for me since I have a lot of old casettes and I was thinking about getting a voice recorder but now I don't have to. The screen seems like it would be too small but in usage it's more than adequate and performs well. The F1 also supports a broad range of audio files which is a plus for me since I prefer OGG over mp3 but I would have liked to see FLAC and MP4 support (although the storage capacity is a bit low for flac anyway so it's not a big deal). The audio quality itself is great, especially with all of Cowon's sound options and the equalizer. The included software is a bit so-so since Jetshell I find to be useless since you can just drag and drop files to the player/manage it through windows in the first place. Although I do now use Jetaudio on my laptop for ripping music into OGG with some decent results even though it seems to be mediocre as a media player.
So in the end the only thing I can really complain about is that I only seem to get about half the life out of the battery compared to the stated 22 hours. This is apparently because I like to use higher quality sound files (320kb cbr ogg as opposed to say 128kb mp3) and I am also using a pair of Sennheisser PX-100 headphones instead of the included earbuds. And though 8-12 hours is more than adequate for what I use it for which is listening while playing video games or just chilling at home... it's kind of a bummer since I am doing just about everything possible otherwise to save on the batter. Actually that wouldn't even be as big of a deal if you didn't have to charge it through the usb cable. I find it a pain to have to turn my computer on for a few hours just to charge up the battery. The ac adapter for this model apparently isn't even available directly from the manufacturer in the US. Although probably the worst thing about charging is that as far as I can tell it gives no indication that charging is complete, even the battery indicator on the player is pretty vague since it never seems to fill up all the way...
Oh and in case you're wondering, the reason I chose this unit over Cowon's other products the iAudio U2 or G3 (I'm not really interested in color screens and video capability) is because I really liked the design. I still think this is one of the best looking mp3 players out there but as I've found out that wasn't really the best reason to get it even though it does indeed perform well. So my advice to anyone reading this who cares most about performance is to check out another of Cowon's higher end products. But if like me you're checking it out because you like the way it looks (it's pretty cute and I do get a lot of positive remarks from everyone who sees it which is nice) I can say that it does have more than just looks.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Awesome MP3 2005-12-24
Comment: I just received this mp3 player yesterday, so of course, I have no information about how it will hold up, but this is a great player. The sound quality is amazing.
It is easy to use, comes with everything you need to get started right away. It is easy to load songs (the computer recognizes it as a removable disc,at least
Windows 2002)and you can just drag and drop files. It is USB charged, which means no batteries and the play time on a charge is decent (22 hours). I haven't used the software yet, but I loaded it and ran it and there doesn't seem to be any problems with it. The folders are easy to get to and the graphic equalizer is great. The earbud head phones it comes with have great sound, but I can never use them because I have small ears and they always fall out. They stay in better than most do though. I bought Sony head phones for jogging, but I use the earbuds in the car. All in all I am very pleased. It is a great mp3 at a very reasonable price. I paid 139.00 for 1 GB. Not bad for a high end player.
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iAudio F1 1 GB Black Turbo MP3 Player
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