Cowon D2

...in the direction of the Cowon D2. Reviews could do nothing but praise this little gadget, and it certainly sounded impressive. With it's high quality touch screen and sound that is supposed to be one of the best, I immediately typed it into Amazon to find how much it cost. I found out they were many other features to write home about. Fair enough there was the absence of Bluetooth, unlike my Samsung YP-S5, but this was more than made up for my the ...
...32gb cards. Coming in three flavours, 4, 8 and 16gb, I decided to upgrade from my usual 8gb capacity and go for the 16. With the addition of a 16gb SD card which was actually quite cheap, this boosted it up to a whopping 32gb capacity! I also chose the one with the digital radio as I quite liked the idea of a portable DAB. This cost £180 (excluding SD card).

I couldn't wait for it to arrive but I made mistake! I loaded all of my 16+ ... more

Being a bit of a self confessed gadget geek, something that seems to be on my annual to do list is the purchase of a new MP3 player. Being something that I use on a daily basis, the sound quality had started to become more of an issue to me than the features of the player. Since it is for listening to music after all, I wanted to really make the most of it.

I done my usual Internet research and when I googled the words 'sound quality', I was happily pointed in the direction of the Cowon D2. Reviews could do nothing but praise this little gadget, and it certainly sounded impressive. With it's high quality touch screen and sound that is supposed to be one of the best, I immediately typed it into Amazon to find how much it cost. I found out they were many other features to write home about. Fair enough there was the absence of Bluetooth, unlike my Samsung YP-S5, but this was more than made up for my the addition of an SD card slot which supports up to 32gb cards. Coming in three flavours, 4, 8 and 16gb, I decided to upgrade from my usual 8gb capacity and go for the 16. With the addition of a 16gb SD card which was actually quite cheap, this boosted it up to a whopping 32gb capacity! I also chose the one with the digital radio as I quite liked the idea of a portable DAB. This cost £180 (excluding SD card).

I couldn't wait for it to arrive but I made mistake! I loaded all of my 16+ gig of music onto the player first, which took ages, only to realise the firmware version I was using had known database issues and none of the file names were displayed and the player re booted randomly. After reading on the Internet, I realised this was simple to sort (would have been simpler if I had done it first) so here is what I recommend you should do upon purchase:
-Download and install the newest firmware (type it in google)
-Download and installer Panasonic SD formatter, then use it to format the players memory (read up about it first)

After I performed these actions, I re-loaded the music on to my player and it has been excellent since! The sound really is as good as they say, highly tweakable yet really packs a punch with my Sony inner earphones. There are plenty of high quality enhancement settings to play around with which I personally like to keep to a minimum and there is also a user EQ. I do recommend you move away from the stock ear buds as they don't really do the player any justice. The menu is not the easiest to navigate, but I love the way you can configure the top buttons to skip tracks which is great when the player is sitting in your pocket. I'm a person who very often likes to have my music in shuffle mode so I hardly have to take my player out of the safety of my pocket at all!

Loading songs on to the player uses drag and drop Windows Explorer method but you can also use many programs to synch. The SD card integrates well on both the computer (both show up like separate external harddrives) and on the player it is just an extra menu. You can use both ID3 browsing and File Browser. I like this better, as you don't really need to worry about tagging all your files, although I do like them tagged for the now playing display. Album art is easy to add, just copy any file with a pic of the album and save it as cover.jpg. Will show up on your now playing screen!

I like the way you can drag you finger up and down the screen to scroll through lots of files, much quicker than using an arrow to drop down them individually. You can also move left and right to exit and enter folder trees. You can download and add your own themes as well by simply dragging one of the many theme files available on to the root of the player and re starting it. Easy and they look a lot better!

Now for the DAB. I was a little bit disappointed about this. It can be a bit temperamental meaning it sometimes fails to scan in a lot of stations. When it does and you can get a good signal (bearing in mind your ear phone wires are your aerial), sound quality is really good. You can't really move around with it though which for me spoils thing a bit as it does nothing more than a regular stand alone DAB. I should have just got the regular D2, would have saved me some money!

Video is not something I use on this player although I have heard it plays them well. I think you need to convert them first to a 340x120 format for playback which is a bit of an annoyance, but luckily it comes with software that has a D2 preset to do just that. I can imagine they look sharp as the screen is sharp and colours are vivid.

Games are just flash games, any one you can find that has the png extension. My experience with games is that they are OK, but you can't play your own music at the same time and it is a limited format. Some games work better than others so I think your best bet will be to read around the net and find out which ones.

The player looks and feels robust although the screen isn't protected. It does come with a screen protector, but this makes the screen look blurry and is prone to bubbling. I just put mine in a cheap camera pouch when storing it away in my bag and it has haled up well. The player also comes with a standard mini USB cable so you might have a spare one already and an AC adaptor which allows for quicker charging without a computer (which I haven't use yet). This is a s well as a CD with conversion an non essential syncing software.

So overall, I love this player. DAB is disappointing, the SD slot is a great addition and the sound is one of the best I've heard so far. I would describe as the difference between your laptop speakers and your hi-fi compared to my Samsung S5. Most people are impressed with and MP3 players sound quality considering what a cassette Walkman sounded like! But now I reckon people are after that little bit more! Roll on the D2! Just remember to upgrade your firmware BEFORE you add your tunes!

Oh and I forgot to mention the battery life! How could I forget the superb way above any other 52 hrs of battery life this player has. You won't need to charge this player for a week and even then it will just be top up. I reckon I charge it for two hours a week! 

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