My Extensive Cowon D2 review part 2

[desiibond]

http://www.thinkdigit.com/forum/show...95#post1045295

Fire it up:


Note: Everytime you change audio in the memory, this players takes few extra seconds to scan and boot.



The main menu of the player has:
· Music
· Video
· Photos
· Text
· Fm Radio
· Voice Recording
· Utilities
· Settings

Display:
The display is very very bright and you can adjust the brightness. At the default level, the display is visible in direct sunlight. It’s really crisp and thanks to the black frame, the device looks really really great. You have option to turn off display after certain amount of time and there is option to put the player into sleep mode after certain amount of idle time. Power management is pretty good and I think this is one of the reasons why it has such a huge battery life.
Navigation:
The menu is pretty simple. Intially, I found difficulty in going through songs list as I was used to the click wheel, but once I got used to this player’s interface, it feels really easy. There are loads of options that you can set or change. Thanks to touch screen, the UI is really good but not as good as that on ipod touch and is certainly better than the one on ipod nano.
Music Playback:
Since this player is designed with music quality in mind, this is the most important feature of the player and without any doubt it excels in this department. By this time, most of you already know that this player is one of the best when it comes to music quality and there are thousands of reviews out there that explain the same. I am going to concentrate on what this player offers and why is it so different from the others


Here is the main playback screen which contains
· Track’s total time
· Time elapsed (you can set it to time left)
· Preset setting values
· Volume level indicator
· Battery level indicator
· Time
· Album Art
· Album artist and track title
When you tap on the display, you get the following screen:


A single tap shows the following controls
· Play/Pause
· Repeat and Skip
· Browser (to go to album list)
· Settings (audio and playback settins)
· Main Menu
· Close this display



As you can see from the above picture, the music settings has options to set Equalizer, BBE, Mach3Bass, 3D Surround, Stereo Enhance, Pan, MP Enhance.
Tap on any of the settings and you will get option to increase or decrease corresponding value:



This player also has custom equalizer and as you can see in the above picture, you can change each and every band for the equalizer.
This is where the beauty of the player lies. It may not look as sexy as ipod touch and it may not have the flaunt value of ipod nano but when it comes to doing music, it’s second to none.
The advantage of having so many settings is that you can set the audio output quality to your own liking. In most other players, only change you can do is equalizer. Here, you can set amount of bass you want, amount of high freq sound you want, set 3D virtual surround, increase the audio quality using MP Enhance and it all works. Once you set desides settings, save them to custom presets (total of five custom presets available for saving).
This player also support Audiobooks and with the available bookmarking feature, you can bookmark a point of playback and when you restart the audiobook, you will get it from the same point.
Podcasts are also support and are pretty easy to manage with bookmarking feature.

Video Playback:
JetAudio is included with this player and it converts every known video to fit D2’s screen. Playback is really smooth with no sync issues between audio and video, thanks to 30fps capability. There isn’t much to write about videos as I haven’t watched many. I will put down few more points once I test them.
Supported formats are
· AVI : MPEG4 ~ 2Mbps, 320x240, 30fps, MP3 audio
· WMV : WMV9 ~ 768kbps, 320x240, 30fps, WMA audio



Photo viewing:

This is one thing that I am slightly disappointed with. Photo viewing is a little bit slow. When you press on next, it takes 2-3 seconds to switch and get full resolution for the photo. You can set any photo that you have on the player as the player’s wallpaper but I still prefer the default wallpaper as it’s pretty decent.



Supported formats: JPG with no limit on file size. Though there is no limit on filesize, bigger files will take longer time to load.

Text viewing:

It’s really good to see that cowon has added text file support and since it has really long battery, when you are really bored, you can play songs in the background and read ebooks (txt) on the player. Text is clean and the text viewer doesn’t have anything special to mention. There is a limit of 2MB for text file size.

Radio:

Radio uses headphones as external antenna and it’s pretty decent and wihle in the building, it’s able to catch and play all the radio stations in Bangalore. But because of it’s superior audio quality, it’s not worthy to listen to radio when you have lot of better quality music lying in it’s memory and that too thousands of such songs. You can save stations but you cannot rename then, which is bad as it’s difficult to remember radio stations by the frequency.
Frequency support: 87.5Mhz ~ 108Mhz with 32-256kbps recording.





Other utilities include Flash Player, Notepad, Calculator and Scientific calculator.


Transfering music:

There are two ways to transfer music:

· Drag and drop
· Sync with media players (WMP, JetAudio, winamp, mediamonkey).


Since this player is MTP device, you can use any media management software to copy songs to the device. To copy videos, you can use JetAudio or utilities like TMPGEnc to convert videos.

I prefer using WMP to copy songs as JetAudio is very confusing to use and it hangs a lot. Once problem that I saw is that when I use drag and drop, most of the albums are listed as unknown and you have to browse the audio based on folders in the player, which is not at all easy and not recommended. My pick for media player to sync the player to is WMP11.

Skins an firmware:

Cowon has released lot of firmware updates and lot of skins and flash games are available for this player. Visit Cowon forum for more detail on this.

Conclusion:
It’s your choice guys. Am not going to write a conclusion for this review. You all should be knowing by now, how powerful this device is.

[Faun]

very nice but still some stupid limitations

[Coool]

Nice review.....

[rhitwick]

Gr8 review dude!!! Kudos...

Two questions:-
1> How do u rate the bundled earphone, in ur first part u've mentioned a few words about it but dat doesn't conclude anything
2>Do u recommend any other earphone to be used with it??

[desiibond]

I would say a strict NO to bundled earphone. GET Sennheiser CX300 or Sony MDR-EX32LP.

[sreenisatish]

Congrats on the purchase! I have a 16GB D2 and I absolutely love it.

Flash skins are amazing. You can get some awesome skins from iaudiophile forums.