Cowon Q5

The latest launch by Cowon, a south-Korean electronics manufacturer of MP3 players and large screen PMPs, is something I’m personally very kicked about. Honestly, we don’t get to see most of what’s launched abroad, and although this is only about to change; the longevity of the change itself could kill the wait. What with PMPs like Archos, Zune etc, still waiting to be imported by some enterprising folk, we have to be content with the few options available in the market.

After the A2, a product in direct competition with the Creative Vision: W, Cowon promises to flood the streets with the Q5. When we met the Cowon representative, I was miffed by the Koreans underplaying what they called a revolutionary product. Despite that, after a lot of nudging we forced them to send us the Q5 for review.

Design
The Q5 features a 5-inch LCD screen, a pleasant departure from the iPod Classic and many others that we are so accustomed to. Unlike the A2, the front portion of the player has only the screen hogging all the attention, with minimal interference from buttons. At 138.8 x 88.5 x 20.0 mm and 380g, it’s quite bulky. You will have to make peace with the fact that a large screen means a bit of bulk.

The left of the player carries, in a particular order, the Wi-Fi antenna, a mic-in, an earphone jack, a USB and a USB host slot, and finally the charging slot. The power on/off slider key that doubles as the hold key is placed on top, alongside the two speaker outlets and the volume keys. The player comes with a leather carry case that can also be used to prop up the player.

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Features
For those still guessing, the Q5 not only plays music but also hogs the limelight for its video playing capabilities. The 5-inch touchscreen LCD can display 16 million colors and offers a resolution of 800 X 480 pixels. It comes in 40GB and 60GB capacities (we got the former for review.)

The device runs on Windows CE 5.0 Professional OS, which stands to be one of the least appreciated features. Perhaps Cowon didn’t find it necessary to invest in a proprietary interface. This is obviously the easy way out – all the Office tools that come bundled with the OS wouldn’t have been possible without the Windows professional OS.

I sincerely wish Cowon had worked on their own UI, since staying true to its reputation, the Windows OS kept hanging time and again. The player takes about 20 seconds to boot, and at times forever!

The fact that the Q5 is powered by the AMD Alchemy 500Mhz CPU allows the Q5 to handle the sluggishness of the OS… well sort of. It comes equipped with 64MB flash and 128MB DDR2 SDRAM.

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The player has TV-out support with NTSC and PAL, and works effortlessly. Like desktop computers, the player settings can be changed via the Control Panel. Although it has office tools like Word etc, one problem I faced was in activating the touchscreen keypad. Ideally the keypad should be activated automatically when the Word document is started. Negative points on this one!

It’s fully equipped with Wi-Fi, and comes bundled with Internet Explorer, which can do pretty much everything. Again, we couldn’t activate the keypad to type a website address. We hope this is a device-specific glitch, or else it will bring down the oomph factor considerably.

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**Video
**The Q5 can handle everything you throw at it. It supports AVI formats just as easily as ASF, WMV and MPG. The 5-inch display makes the experience that much richer. One of the main reasons why I would want to pick this up would be the ease of dragging and dropping content directly into the player. Although it comes with iAudio software, there is absolutely no need to use it while transferring movies, or music for that matter. Screen clarity is awesome, although some mosaic compression was visible, the blacks are quite accurate.

Cowon has always been one to pack fully functional settings, so you feel you’re in charge with the player and not the other way round. You can control aspect ratios between 4:3, 16:9, Auto and Full Screen; also fiddle with the play speed (if you are so inclined), change the subtitle color, and not to mention the video brightness and contrast right down to controlling the reds, blues and greens.

One thing missing from the A2 was the touchscreen feature that we first saw in the D2. Now the Q5 bridges the gap with what seems like an answer to my prayers. I’m not one of the proponents of the touchscreen revolution, well not just yet, unless of course if you ignore the iPhone, but having it means ease of use. You can directly tap on the progress bar without having to hold down the fast-forward button to reach anywhere within the length of the movie.

Other features include an option to save snapshots of your favorite scene, and be able to start the movie from where you left it the last time before you shut off. As an experiment, I rigged the player through the aux input in my car deck, and voila! I enjoyed movies with surround sound system with my friends. All thanks to the 5-inch screen.

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Music and Photos
The Q5 supports MP3, OGG, WMA, WAV and ASF, but what takes my breath away is support for FLAC. I have always been a fan of the Cowon sound, and the Q5 is no different. It comes packed with effects like BBE, Mach3Bass, 3D surround etc. and given the propensity of our tests, I can say you won’t ever get down to using them. The bundled earphones can handle output at 68mW, and are quite good.

The player not only has Bluetooth support but also features HSPDA profile, so that you can use your Bluetooth headset. It has an FM radio and a voice recorder with a built-in mike and a mike-in too.

Having a big screen means you can not only use it for music and movies but also enjoy pictures easily. If you are a budding photographer or just out clicking pictures, it makes sense to want to know about the USB host feature. It allows you directly interact with other devices, namely cameras, MP3 players etc using the USB host slot. Every time you are out of camera space, just transfer all the pictures to the Q5 – and flaunt them on the 5-inch screen. Similarly, you can pull content from your friend’s players. It supports JPG, BMP and PNG formats.

Now, about the battery life. It sucks. This is a big disappointment, since the A2 battery rocked – it could manage three movies in a row, but the Q5 can barely manage one. This one costs around Rs 34,000, which is about 10K more than the A2. Now think about it, you can watch movies, listen to music, read text files, view pictures, surf the Internet, take notes in Word (even though it didn’t work as we hoped) and more. Considering a few downsides – bad battery life being one – I would suggest that you wait till the price comes down slightly. As a portable media player, you can’t ask for more than what the Q5 already bundles.