The A3 from Cowon is very much similar to the Q5W which is an extremely competent portable media player that comes with windows CE 5.0 and WiFi. The Cowon A3 being very similar to the Q5W it is still a much different player and it costs at different prices that depend on its storage capacity. The Cowon A3 is available in 30 GB and 40GB but the interesting part is that the core functionality of the device is more from an expensive sibling. With the hard disc capacity of 30 GB and 60 GB that costs much more than the price including the dual core processing chip with supportive high definition video the Cowon A3 has the potential to become the most advanced handheld media system in the world.
The Design
There is a 4 inch screen with around 800×480 pixel resolution that takes up the most part of the glossy face of the device. Towards the right side of the device is a tiny navigation joystick and apart from the back buttons function for all other buttons depend on what mode the player is used. Although this a great function to keep things simple it however does not make up for the tiny joystick. The system is very chunky, rugged and perfectly built not any less attractive compared to the Q5W. Component outputs and inputs and the USB port composite are behind the small flap at the left side under the 3.5mm headphone socket. Similar to Q5W this device also does not include a kickstand to support the player up during hands free movie watching.
Features
The Cowon A3 supports H.264, Xvid, DivX, MPEG-4, WMV, VOB and MKV among the few audio formats and the media player is a seriously adaptable video player. The VOB format means that you can just drag your media files of any ordinary DVD in the hard disk of the player and it would play perfectly without any transcoding and DVD ripping needed. This property is itself an amazing feature and you also have the option to record video from any video source. This is again the same for you audio files as you can not only record live FM but can also listen to it later on and there are also options to record stereo audio in FLAC and MP3. the player would play most inclusive list of formats that you might know that include, Lossless, WMA, MP3, Apple Lossless, OGG, FLAC, WMA, ACC, WAV, and Monkey’s Audio. The Cowon A3 also supports images which are of nearly 15 megapixels in resolution along with zoom controls.
The Cowon A3 player also includes a 10 band equalizer to play your audio with along with adjustable playback speed and it also supports multiple audio tracks. All this media is simply managed by the drag and drop file process with OS X and Windows through the mini USB. All the cables that you might require are included in the box which also includes composite and component video leads.
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