Measuring 78.0 X 55.4 X 16.6 mm and weighing just 91 grams the D2 is one of the smallest PMP's we've seen to date and is in fact smaller than a credit card (although not as thin). It easily sits in the palm of your hand or neatly in a pocket in fact the only disappointment is that the screen is 4:3 and not a full 16:9 aspect ratio.

The whole front is taken up by a 2.5" TFT screen which is a real operational touch screen, no clickable corners or scroll wheels. The styling is at best functional if not just a tad geek, the lack of controls on the front does make it look very clean and crisp and only the top edge contains a few basic buttons and sliders. Both audio and video files are stored on flash memory of which our unit was loaded with 4gb equivalent to an iPod Nano but you can also top this up using the SD / MMC card slot.

The 320 by 240 pixel resolution screen looks good and presents a very simple interface which enables you to navigate the Cowon with consummate ease. So what do you get for your cash? The D2 is primarily a music player that supports MP3, OGG, WMA, FLAC and WAV which is a very comprehensive list of formats, it also handles the AVI format which is limited to the same resolution as the screen and will probably have to be created via the bundled Jet audio software.

We started by loading a collection of audio tracks onto the Cowon iAudio D2 via the USB 2.0 port which was a speedy process as the unit is recognised by both Windows and Mac as a mass storage device. The tracks appear in a folder structure and are navigable using the touch screen. Select a track and hit play to hear as we did, that the Cowon really does sound good, even with the standard earbuds the audio is punchy and yet well weighted with a clarity that you'd normally only get from the best MP3 players.

When tested with a set of Shure E2C's then the D2 really comes alive managing to extract the best sound from our encoded MP3 files at 192kbps and some Ogg files encoded at the same high bitrate. As the unit was passed around the office we did start to notice one flaw of the touch screen design, the dreaded finger prints! It seems that the 2.5" LCD is highly susceptible to the odd paw print and within a few hours of visiting various desks it looked like a group of 8 year olds had taken it to a finger painting class.

Next time to try video playback and essential part of a PMP and the only real difference between a high end MP3 player and a PMP. We took some WMV files which had been ripped from DVD's for previous PMP tests and fed them into the Jet audio software running on a PC, they were quickly processed and chopped down to size in AVI format. Once loaded onto the D2 they played smoothly enough but the pictures had suffered two fold, once from the compression and also from being shoehorned into such a low resolution (QVGA). We did try pushing over a WMV file encoded at VGA resolution just on the off chance that it would play, of course it could be stored but trying to playback the file crashed the D2 and required a reboot to bring it back to life. We tried some higher resolution files (2mbits) and pushed these through the Jet software, these produced better more watchable video files but the increase in file size meant the transcode took longer.

There is an FM tuner within the D2 and much to our surprise it is quite good, normally these things just get thrown in as a last minute thought, but not only is the tuner well integrated (you can even record from it at 256kbits) but it also very sensitive. So we could test not just with national radio stations like radio one and classic FM but also some of the local stations which still sounded good without too much hiss and fade.

The D2 can also be used as a photo viewer with JPEG supported and the ability to build slideshows, this feature combined with a TV out should be a winner, but unlike other PMP's the D2 cannot show song titles or other details alongside the slideshow which we found a bit limiting.

What the Cowon does have going for it in a big way is the battery, Cowon claim a 50hr music playback time for the D2 and we had a bit of a tough time testing that and ended up leaving it running on a desk for over 40hrs before admitting defeat. Use of the LCD screen backlight can reduce this performance but we doubt anyone would leave the backlight on enough to make a real dent in the huge battery life. Video playback is more taxing and does require the backlight, we still managed over 8 hours video replay enough for a transatlantic flight. This excellent battery performance is down to the flash memory which is much more energy efficient to read from than a spinning disk as used in an iPod.

The Cowon iAudio D2 could be accused of falling between two stalls. It is neither a fully fledged PMP due to its limitations in the video department and it is more than an MP3 player even a video iPod which has the same 2.5" screen size as the D2. Perhaps the closest comparison is with the iRiver Clix which is also a mixture of video PMP and MP3 player and has roughly the same screen size, if we pitch these two head to head then the massive battery life of the Cowon and the full touch screen win through.

So the Cowon D2 manages to address a niche for the ultra portable PMP, we are just not yet convinced that there is a real market for a small PMP, even with a big battery.

Published - 20/05/2007

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