Its been almost a month since i purchased my Cowon J3 PMP. I bought it from Liplap, the official cowon dealers in India for a "special offer" price of 14.5k with the cowon original J3 leather case (worth 1.2k) for free
The following review will be based on my usage pattern but I’ll try to highlight things that may concern future buyers
The Package:
It comes in a plastic vase like container (which can be used as a flower pot) with the device, a manual, software cd, usb cable and earphones. I’d recommend users to download the comprehensive manual thats available online. The software cd contains the jetaudio software, a lyrics downloader and a podcast finder which quite frankly are of no use if you have an app like mediamonkey and minilyrics. The bundled earphones are rubbish
like most bundled earphones and pair of iems is highly recommended.
The Device:
When you hold the device in your hand for the first time, all you think about is, if should be using more than 2 fingers to support this
Its astonishingly light at just 76g. The size is something that needs to be acknowledged as well. It fits in any pocket of my pants without making a bulge or making it uncomfortable for any activity. The build quality isn’t something that you would brag about but the plastic body doesn’t feel like it could fall apart or sustain any damage during regular use. The screen is covered with cowon’s gorilla glass which they claim to be resistant to pressure. From my experience, I can safely say that the screen is scratch resistant and does not gather dust. It does leave fingerprints but cleaning it is just a wipe away. I’ve used my t-shirt and my handkerchief and both work fine
It has the usb and microsd slots at the bottom, covered with a clinging cover. The 3.5mm audio plug is located beside these slots. The presence of physical keys on the side is a huge advantage. The bezel may seem to be quite redundant at first but it goes unnoticed after a while. A tiny speaker is located on the backside which is as loud as the ones on the PSP. While they aren’t of any use in most cases, they are good enough to watch a video on, in a silent room and a feature that wont go unappreciated.
The Touch and the Screen:
The display is gorgeous like most amoled screens. The viewing angles, the contrast and the colors are superb. Even outdoors, the brightness pwns most lcd screen phones. I’ve used a iphone 3GS and a itouch 2nd gen. The touch on this beauty is works as wonderfully as on both those devices. Matter of fact, the scrolling on this is faster and more accurate than on the itouch/iphone. The screen size at 3.3” doesn’t ever feel too small and shows every detail very well even at its 480x270 resolution.
The Firmware:
You can have 3 “desktops” at any given time. I love the zune style menu screen. While the main menu is simple yet very resourceful, the internal menus do require some reading of the manual and aren’t that intuitive when it comes to the icons. Both the music and video player have plenty of playback options. The motion sensor inverts the video in the direction of your viewing smoothly and the “shake” track change feature works nicely too. Both players have an uncluttered interface. The player supports all the popular audio and video formats directly by drag-n-drop. H.264 doesn’t work unless you transcode it in a specific way. All other given video formats work smoothly at dvd resolutions. Subtitles and lyrics can be viewed as well. The radio works well in areas of good signal strength but most phones would outdo it in areas of weak signals. The picture viewer and notepad work very nicely with the various touch controls. The document and comic reader work smoothly at any size of files. With around 1100 different audio format files and a couple of videos, the J3 takes about 4 secs to boot from a power off and a almost instantaneous boot from sleep. However, when changes are made and the database has to be updated, it takes around 10-12secs to scan the whole thing.
App and Games support:
Most flash games/apps for the cowon s9 work with the J3 but this feature isn’t what you should be buying the PMP for. The games are pretty basic and there aren’t many of them that work well with the touch controls.
Battery:
I haven’t been able to test the claimed 64hrs of audio playback time but this certainly gave me a 9.5hr video playback time at the 5th (out of 7) brightness level after my 1st battery charge! During a typical week, I play about 7hrs of video and 12hrs of music along with 3hrs of document reading and I don’t have to do a full battery charge again other than a few dozen mins of charge it receives while I transfer videos/music to it
The SQ:
This PMP is a beast when it comes to audio performance. I use it with my soundmagic pl50 with it and I tested a fiio e5 amp and found it completely unnecessary. I play my music at almost a third of the max volume outdoors and in the train/bus, while I lower it by another 3 units when I’m at home. The preset equalizers would satisfy the expectations of most users but custom eq menu opens up the most detailed eq menus ever made. You can save upto 4 custom eq profiles at a time on the device. The BBE chip on this delivers everything as it was meant to be heard or as you want it to sound like. It’d be hard to find any J3 user who wouldn’t use its custom equalizer. This sole feature just wipes out the competition as far as audiophile expectations are concerned. I was surprised and pleased to hear a lot of my avant-garde angst music not sounding musical because they weren’t meant to be! And whenever I’d want a little sugar coat on it, I had to just use the custom eq or any of the presets
The Bad:
At 14.5k and a recommended 1.2k leather case, this is expensive. Ideally it should’ve come at for 2k less or with a set of respectable earphones. I hope most users will get the leather case for free because although I wouldn’t worry about babying this around, you always want to be safe with a device this slim and small.
You wished this played h.264 out of the box without any transcoding since it is the format that is widely used in the market nowadays
PDF support would’ve been a nice addition. As it stands, with the current firmware, I have to convert my documents to text or images for viewing them.
The Complaints: I hope they address these issues in future firmware updates.
The lyric viewer uses the karaoke style of display with the help of synced lyrics. Now, this may work well for many, I listen to music that requires me to scroll my lyrics at my will to understand the theme OR most of the lyrics aren’t popular enough to have synced versions. Hence, I use the document viewer to read the lyrics.
The subtitles stay on the screen until the next set of subtitles. This may not annoy most users for movies with more dialogues but it does look bad when the time stretches to some mins.
The Good:
Stunning sound quality
Excellent portable video player
Battery life
No proprietary format or app needed
Expandable memory
Lag free and very responsive touch screen
Physical buttons
If you want the best multimedia experience, fast performance without any restrictions; this is the perfect PMP. Convergence and proprietary standards be damned
pics:
http://melv1n.myphotoalbum.com/view_...umName=album01 (sorry about my shaky hand and camera. i cant help it
)
Cowon J3 review
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