Cowon D2

 

Recently the opportunity to join the gym for free at my workplace arose. This presented me with a bit of a problem though, while I rarely turn down free things well gyms are usually boring places that blast top 40 music, allowing you to lower your IQ while you tone your body. Well, knowing that I would want my own stimulating and challenging music to accompany me on my quest for fitness, I jotted down my mp3 player needs. The main one was video playback, since I spend way too much time on the train every week. A few minor necessities queued up after that, such as flexibility of formats and long battery life.

In comes the Cowon D2, a South Korean gem that weighs in at about $160 for the two gig model and $185 for the four gigs. While the onboard memory might sound a little restrictive, rejoice in knowing that you can also use SDHC cards to supplement your storage space. In my case I dropped a few extra bucks for a Patriot brand 8 gig SDHC card topping me off at a comfortable 10 gigs.

After a swift delivery from newegg.com I ripped the package open and almost cried from joy when I realized that the device comes fully charged! Minutes later I was using the USB adapter to drag and drop mp3’s onto its hard drive and the 8 gig SDHC. The device handles SD cards smartly, treating itself as a card reader and creating a new drive for the card in question.

At first I was a little bit disappointed by how simple my new toy seemed, but after further inspection I realized that the branching list of options had real depth including play lists and custom equalizer settings. Also included out of the box is a nifty voice recorder, a text reader (txt only I fear), FM tuner and picture viewer. Thanks to its processing power there is no significant delay when jumping from picture to picture or movie to movie. Even a feature length film allowed me to jump back and forth from one scene to another with no interruption to its robust frame rate.

At this point I found myself deeply smitten by the device and one of its unfortunate side effects kicked in. It touts itself as “digital pride”; a concept that didn’t make sense at first but after bragging to every single acquaintance I have and a few strangers too I realized that a downright sinful sense of pride had invaded me. This was only aggravated by the 2.5 firmware update, which granted me an MS paint style notepad and the ability to play flash games and applications from the ubiquitous Tetris to more creative diversions such as a game called “Turtle Boat Battle” which combines Worms and Battle Ship.

So yeah, as with all mp3 players I’m probably supposed to declare at this point if it’s an i-Pod killer or not. But I won’t bother, the i-Pod is irrelevant to people who care about issues such as DRM and proprietary formats. Do you want a device that plays videos and mp3’s better the competition at a pretty low price? Pick one up. Do you want a piece of digital “Bling” from a company that routinely screws over its users? Then there are a lot of i-Pod models to choose from.

And how is the gym going? Real good, turns out that my gym mostly plays the news on it’s TVs but still that doesn’t stack up to my NPR pod casts and special interest updates, all available for free through the bundled podcast ready software included on the Cowon D2’s drive.  And the digital pride part? I’ve already got one co-worker picking up a model and for all you know it might even force me to write a review of it. Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that.