[Update]I know I've been promising a video review for this. However, I had been sick for weeks and was unable to do so. Now that I'm all better, it looks like Cowon has an official video for the A3 already. It looks pretty good so I decided to not finish my video and just let you look at Cowon's official one instead.

Packaging:

• Cowon A3
• earphones
• USB 2.0 cable
• AV cable
• high quality AV cable
• AC power adapter
• hand strap
• installation CD, quick guide
• USB Host cable
  

Specifications (abridged):

• 4” LCD 800x480 (16 million colors)
• 30GB/60GB 1.8” hard drive (FAT32)
• support for virtually every popular audio/video file format
• joystick control
• built-in microphone
• FM radio
• USB
• dual speakers
• line-in video/audio recording

Introduction

First of all, I have never had any direct experience with the A2. So if you are looking for an A2 vs. A3 comparison, you will need to look elsewhere. A good starting point would be iAudiophile.net . I gathered most of the information about the A2 from Martin Plappert's review from that site. So, by all means, visit iAudiophile.net for more information. There are die-hard Cowon fans always eager to help you out.

Austin Vaughan of iAudiophile.net is also working a Cowon A3 review. I encourage you to look at his review when it comes out. It will give you a much more detailed look at what the A3 can do.

Initial Impression

As mentioned, on the outside, the A3 looks almost like the A2. The casing is now in metallic silver rather than pearlish white. The size and weight are virtually the same as the old player.

Like the A2, the navigational joystick and the 4 slim buttons are prominently located on right front of the player. The two speakers and mic are located at the top. To the left, you would find the earphone jack, AV in, AV out, composite/s-video, USB port and the DC in. The power button on the right side of the unit. And still unchanged, the reset button and output switcher can be found at the bottom of the unit.

Upon turning the unit on, however, it's a different beast altogether. The LCD screen now stares back at 800x480 pixels sharp, vibrantly displaying up to 16 million colors. The icons representing each function have been redesigned to make the most of the higher resolution and colors. In fact, every display element has been improved to take advantage of the higher resolution screen. An efficient use of color and translucency makes the user interface quite an eye candy for its user.

User interface and navigation

The user interface of the A3 is very intuitive; you hardly need to open a manual to use this player. Its main screen shows icons representing all the 10 main functions of the player. These include Movie, Music, Photo, Document, Browser, Mobile TV, Radio, Record, Recent Files and Setup. The user navigates through the user interface using a 4-direction joystick and 4 slim buttons (Back, A, B and C). To perform a function, the user presses down on the joystick. The Back button takes the user back to the previous screen. The rest of the buttons change functions depending on what screen is current displaying.

In practice, however, the user will find that the joystick does not always perform the function it is supposed to do. Specifically, pressing down on the joystick to perform a function may occasionally make the player think that you're pressing on it sideways and not down. This can be rather frustrating as you may want the player to do one thing and it's doing something entirely different. However, over time, the user will learn how to apply just the right amount of pressure to master the joystick.

Video Playback

Thanks to the Texas Instruments DaVinci chip, the video playback on the A3 is nothing short of stunning. The video player supports almost every popular file format/codecs combination currently available. Adding to the usual file formats such as AVI, WMV and ASF, the movie player also plays movies from the following formats: MATROSKA(MKV), VOB, DAT and MTV.

With the ability to play back DVD's own VOB file, the user can now forego the need for ripping DVDs, which normally degrades the quality of both video and audio. The VOB files can now be copied and viewed directly. The main drawback is that VOB files take up much more space than other file formats.

In term of video codecs, the Movie Player has generous support for formats such as DivX 3.11/4/5/6, XviD, MPEG-4, WMV 9/8/7, H.264, and MPEG1/2. This is probably the most extensive support one can find anywhere. Add to that the ability to play encoded audio of formats like FLAC, OGG Vorbis, AAC/AAC+ and AC3. There is no stopping the A3.

To test video capability of the A3, I used my trusted Handbrake utility to rip DVDs in various file format/codecs combination. The file formats tested were MKV, OGM, MP4 and AVI. For each of the file format, I went through all the different combination of video codecs (MPEG4 video, H.264) and audio codecs (AAC, AC-3, MP3, Ogg Vorbis). Testing rather exhaustively, the player had no trouble playing any encoded movie file.

As for other file formats and codecs, I opted to download sample files from the internet to do my test. Again, the movie player breezed through most of these sample clips. I even played the “bear.wmv” sample file from Windows Vista that the Q5W had trouble playing; the player played it flawlessly.

Everything went very well. That is until I threw some 720p HD video files at it. The ability to play high definition video files is one of the major selling point for the A3. Though I was not able to find any 720p MKV files, I was able to download several 720p WMV clips from Microsoft's WMV HD Content Showcase page .

Playing 720p WMV files on the A3 was choppy, sometimes getting just 2 – 3 fps by my observation. The DaVinci chip that performed flawlessly at playing other video files was brought to its knees attempting to play these high definition videos. I ran it through about 10 different video files and results were the same: choppy video playback. So if you were looking to buy the A3 to play 720p videos, you might want to rethink.

[Update]As requested, I attempted playing 720p MPEG4 video files on the A3 and got a little bit better results. First, I played the latest episode of Zen Living podcast (HD) called "Budokan". For most part, the video playback was not as choppy as the WMV counterpart. However, the audio lagged behind the video by as much as 2 - 3 seconds. The second video I attempted was taken from Washingtonpost.com's latest episode of its HD podcast called "Christian Rock and Politics in Iowa". Like the other MPEG4 file, the audio lagged behind; not only that, the video got pixelated on some scenes. So at least with 720p WMV files, the audio and video were always in sync even when the playback was choppy.

Viewing videos on the A3's screen is just half the fun. The video can also be output via composite, s-video or component connection. With this, you can now easily share your photos and videos with friends and family.

Over all, the video player on the A3 does an exceptional job at playing video files of just about any file format and codec. The playback is smooth and flawless. Just keep in mind that it doesn't have enough power to play 720p video files well.

Audio Playback

Like the video player, the music player on the A3 supports a long list of audio file formats and codecs out there. Whereas the A2 only supported MP3, WMA(ASF), OGG and WAV, the music player on the A3 can also play file encoded with FLAC, AAC/AAC+, AC3, Apple Lossless, True Audio, Monkey Audio, MusePack, WavPack, G.726 and PCM. No other player comes close.

To the best of my knowledge, the A3 is the first Cowon player to be able to play Apple's own file formats like Apple Lossless and AAC/AAC+. This is a big step for Cowon. Many users had been waiting for AAC support for quite a long time. Personally, I couldn't be more happier for the Apple Lossless support since most of my CDs were ripped and encoded using that format. I no longer have to convert my Apple Lossless files to FLAC.

The Music Player on the A3 is quite a looker. With the song information showing on the left and the sound spectrum dancing to the right, it is quite a joy to look at. My only gripe with the player, visually, is that it fails to display album art from MP4 and Apple Lossless files.

To enhance the listening experience further, the A3 comes with a sound enhancement feature called jetEffect, which is standard on all Cowon players. jetEffect is actually 4 audio-enhancement technologies that work on different aspects of the sound. These are BBE (sound field effect for music clarity), Mach3Bass (bass enhancer), MP3 Enhance (“fills in” missing sound segments in MP3 files) and 3D Surround (3D sound effect).

Another sound enhancing element is the 10 Band EQ with 8 presets (Normal, Rock, Jazz, Classic, Pop, Metal, Vocal and User). With this, there is just no end to how you can shape your listening experience on the A3.

Photo Viewing

The A3 comes with a rather basic photo viewer. With it you can view photos from the following formats: JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF, BMP and RAW. Thanks to its reflective high resolution screen, the photos look sharp and vibrant – very visually pleasing. The navigation is simple: push left on the joystick to view the previous photo, pushing right does the opposite.

The photo viewer does need some improvements though. Unlike other photo viewers, it does not have a thumbnail mode to preview the photos. Everything is displayed as text. Also, there is no zoom or pan function, which would have made the viewer much more useful.

[Update]To zoom into a photo, you can press down on the joystick. You can then pan around the photo pressing the joystick in the desired direction. The viewer supports to up 4x magnification.

FM Radio

Like most PMPs on the market, the A3 comes with an FM radio. You can have up to 25 presets to store your favorite stations; if you need more than 25, you are spending way too much time listening to the radio.

On screen, the radio is laid out to show the frequency on the left and the 25 presets on the right. The presets are represented in 25 rectangles in 5 rows of 5. In terms of the navigation, you use the joystick to go left or right to go to a preset. It is a tad bit deceiving because you would think you can navigate up and down the presets but this is not the case. The up and down directions are used for volume control. I prefer it that way anyway because it makes the interface consistent.

In order to get a good reception, you do need to plug in the earphones; after all, they act as antennas. It is a shame that rarely will you ever hear radio sounds coming out of the A3 speakers because of the earphones requirement. But this limitation is hardly unique to this player.

Recording

One of A3's strong points is the ability record from various sources including built-in microphone, FM radio, line-in audio/video and MobileTV (which is not supported in the US).

For video recording, the A3 can record via s-video or composite. The format for video recording is ASF and up to 720x480 3Mbps. With this kind of video recording capability, there is no excuse to hang on to those VHS (or BetaMax) tapes any longer. Just record directly to the A3. It is also great for recording TV shows and movies.

Line-in audio recording has two options: FLAC and WMA. Depending on what you want to record, FLAC offers lossless audio recording suits for recording audio from concerts whereas WMA saves on space. It can record up to 192Kbps.

You can also record from FM radio and built-in microphone. However, it only records in WMA up to 192 Kbps.

The A3 also comes with a Timer Recording feature that allows you to schedule a recording instead of you having to be there to record. With this feature, the A3 is transformed to be more like a VCR or rather a poor man's Tivo.

Viewing documents

There are two documents viewers on the A3: a text viewer and an CSD viewer. Obviously, the text viewer is used view text files (including Unicode). The CSD viewer, however, is used to view .CSD files which are converted from PDF, DOC, PPT, XLS, HWP, GUL and HTML).

Battery Test [Updated]

If there is one major flaw to the A3, it would be battery life. With play time of only 7 hours for video and 9 hours for audio, it is hardly anything to write home about. I'm assuming that this goes to feed the new and improved LCD.

In my test, I was able to get 6.5 hours of video, playing AVI video files encoded with MPEG4 video/ MP3 audio. The LCD brightness was set to 5 and the volume to 20 through the speakers. At about 6 hours and 20 minutes, the speakers actually turned themselves off and then 10 minutes later the battery just died out completely.

Improvements I would like to see

• remote control – the A3 can output video files to a TV. But with no remote, it can't be a substitute for a DVD player in the living room.
• TV Schedule syncing – it is nice to have a Timer Recording feature. However, it would be more seamless if one can record from the actual TV schedule rather than just inputing the times into the scheduler. My suggestion is to come up with an application that can read local TV schedule and then allow the user to schedule recording from the application. Once the A3 is connected via the USB port, all the recording schedules will then be transferred.

Conclusion

The Cowon A3 is a versatile PMP destined for greatness. Though it does not have fancy features like WiFi or Bluetooth, it does one thing amazingly well: playing media files. No other players support more file formats and codecs than the A3. Add to that a gorgeous LCD screen, an intuitive interface and the ability to use it as a poor man's Tivo, there is just no end to what this little player can do.

Verdict: Highly recommended

Comments (76)

Yaron said:

Thanks for the review! How does the battery life, in your experience, compares to the official specs? Can you get more than the official 9 hours of audio out of it by doing something like turning off the screen, or whatever?

December 17, 2007

Ed said:

Luckk, your experience pretty much mirrors mine. The only problems I've run into are with 720p content. One note that may be of interest to people playing MKV and OGM files (think anime) is that you must, MUST extract the subtitle track and rename it with the appropriate extension. The A3 cannot (presently) read embedded subtitles, though it has no issues with embedded audio tracks.

December 17, 2007

Bob said:

My interest in this player has been piqued! I do have a few questions though: 1. Does it support gapless playback? If not, how bad is the gap between songs? 2. Is it drag and drop, or do you have to use software? 3. Does the music portion support playlists? 4. Can you delete songs and playlists directly from the machine? 5. What are its dimensions? It looks HUGE from the pictures. Great review!

December 17, 2007

Andre said:

So when you select a picture you cannot zoom in on it at all? I thought this was something the A2 could do.

December 17, 2007

luckk said:

Yaron, I will get the details from my contact at Cowon to find out how they performed the battery test. Then, I will update the review with that information.

December 17, 2007

luckk said:

Ed, thank you for that information.

December 17, 2007

luckk said:

Hello, Bob. Thank you for your questions. Here are my attempts at the answers: 1) No, it doesn't. 2) You can either drag and drop or use software (on Windows). My computers are all Intel Macs so I use both methods. 3) Yes, it supports playlists. 4) I haven't tried this but I will get back to you on this. 5) 133.4 (W) x 78.5(H) x 22.0 (T) mm. Imagine a thick iPhone.

December 17, 2007

luckk said:

Andre, I tried everything. I consulted the manual and didn't see anything about zooming or panning. I didn't know that the A2 supported that either. Maybe you know something I don't.

December 17, 2007

Peter said:

Glad to see the A3 finally appear and with support for H.264 and Matroska as earlier advertised. With 720p, I'm guessing it has to scale down these videos on-the-fly to fit the actual screen resolution the way my A2 scales down 640x480 or 704x400 files. Considering that I own PCs that cannot play 720p H.264 encodes without stuttering, I'm not surprised the Cowon has this problem as well. Decoding and rescaling every frame is a lot of work for that little CPU. What output connections does it have? HDMI? Component? Is it possible to play an HD video on an external HDTV? We've been very happy with the Cowon except for a problem with the power supply. They fixed it and returned it within a week, though, so it wasn't a big deal, just an annoyance. (As Ed mentioned, if you're looking for 720p encodes in the MKV container for testing, I'd suggest browsing for recent anime fansubs.) @Ed: Do you mean I need to extract the subs and save them as a .ass or .srt file?

December 17, 2007

luckk said:

Peter, you are correct about the A3 scaling down the video to fit the screen. However, it can output 720p content to HDTV. The highest quality you can get is via component video. It would be fantastic if it can output in HDMI. Keep bugging Cowon, maybe one day they come out with that.

December 17, 2007

Andre said:

according to the manual, when viewing a picture press the thumbstick in and it should zoom. Once zoomed you should be allowed to pan.

December 17, 2007

TJ said:

first of all, you can zoom in on pictures by clicking the center toggle. second, you can turn on the speakers in the sound options after you've plugged in your earphones, so you can have sound coming out of both your eadbuds and your integrated speakers. 720p video cannot even be played by an average computer very well, and you should definitely try formats other than WMV.

December 17, 2007

Yaron said:

Luckk, thanks, that would be appreciated. But I was also wondering about your own experience with it, and not just the official Cowon "lab" measurements. That is, if so far you managed to use it for enough time to get indications on how fast the battery died compared with your expectations and the official numbers.

December 17, 2007

ZileXa said:

Hey, did you try MPEG4 files with 720p resolution? This does not need much CPU power and can be played fairly at least on most pc's. Compared to WMV and especially H264.

December 17, 2007

Ganesh said:

The A3 definitely can browse music in a folder structure. But can you browse audio by ID3 tags like an Ipod? A2 could not do this. Can the A3? For subtitles, you said it had problems displaying embeddable subtitles. Is this only for mkv files or for all soft subs like srt and ssa files for their corresponding avi or mpeg files? Can you post videos of you using the A3? And where did you buy thi? I am unable to find it in the stores as I would like to weigh it in my own hands.

December 17, 2007

Ganesh said:

Also to follow up on the audio aspects, can you rate songs on the A3? And can you display lyrics from the ID3 tags?

December 17, 2007

luckk said:

Andre and TJ, you are correct. I will update the review accordingly. So much for being thorough. I was searching the manual for the word "zoom" and "pan". Instead the manual uses the word "magnifier" instead. I have only but myself to blame for this.

December 17, 2007

Ganesh said:

Sorry for this additional post but I really like this player! Can you also explain more details about the playlist support? Can it handle m3u playlists from Winamp? My last last player Iriver mp3 cd player IMP-250 could do this. And can you make playlists on the go? And is there a limit? I heard the A2 has a limit of 100 or similar.

December 17, 2007

luckk said:

TJ, thank you for the information about modifying the sound option to turn on sound output from both speakers and earphones.

December 17, 2007

luckk said:

ZileXa, I did not try other formats. However, from reading forum posts on the web, the A3 also has difficulties playing 720p MKV files. I will see if I can find 720p MPEG4 files to test out.

December 17, 2007