Digital Trends

Cowon A3 60GB February 19th, 2008 | by Mike Kobrin

Design and Features

The A3 comes in silver with black trim or all black, and it measures 5.2 x 0.9 x 3.1 inches -- not as slim as Archos's Gen 05 line of PMPs but not as brick-like as its big brother, the Cowon Q5. It has a 4-inch widescreen LCD that supports 16.7 million colors and has double the resolution of the A2, at 800 x 480 pixels. The 1.8-inch hard drive comes in capacities of 30GB ($319.99 USD) or 60GB ($389.99 USD), which is normal for a large-screen PMP, though we'd like to see a bigger hard drive option given the device's high-res AV recording capabilities.

Four chrome buttons adorn the area to the right of the screen, with the tiny joystick just above them. On the top edge of the player there are a pair of small speakers and a monaural microphone, while the reset hole and hold/output switch are on the bottom. Power is on the right edge, and ports for earphones, power, USB 2.0/Host, AV in and out, and S-Video/composite out are covered by a plastic flap on the left.

The overall design is clean and sleek, and the gadget's heft (9.5 ounces) gives it a solid, durable feel. It fits easily in a jacket or loose pants pocket, though its weight can make it a bit cumbersome.

Wireless features like Bluetooth and WiFi are all the rage in portable media players, but Cowon left both out in the A3, concentrating instead on making it an AV playback and recording powerhouse. Aside from video, photo, and music playback, the A3 has an FM tuner, a video recorder, an audio recorder, and a text viewer. Compared with Archos's 605 WiFi, the A3 represents a tidier solution, since everything you need to record audio (via the integrated mic or line-in) and video is built-in instead of requiring optional components.

Support for lots of file formats, from the popular to the obscure, has always been one of Cowon's strong suits. The A3 handles all the usual suspects like MP3, WMA, OGG, and AAC/AAC+, as well as multiple lossless formats like Apple Lossless, FLAC, and APE. It even reads several extremely obscure formats like BSAC, True Audio, WavPack, G.726, CM. Video formats abound too, including most common formats found on file-sharing sites or via BitTorrent, like AVI (DivX, XviD, MPEG-4), MP4 (H.264 and MPEG-4), WMV, ASF, and MPG (MPEG-1 and 2), plus MKV, OGM, and VOB files (common for DVD rips).

Conspicuously left out is support for Windows Media DRM 10, the basis for many online music and movie services including CinemaNow, Vongo, and Napster. But given the proliferation of DRM-less music stores like Amazon.com and the A3's ability to record video, content isn't in short supply.

Cowon accommodated shutterbugs by including faster USB Host connectivity for transferring files directly from cameras (or many other gadgets) to the A3. And in addition to JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIF, and BMP, the A3 now supports the RAW image format, which should please serious photo enthusiasts and pros. (Of course, that would have been another reason to include a larger hard drive.)

Image Courtesy of Cowon