The Cowon J3 doesn’t do apps. It won’t multitask, and it doesn’t have Wi-Fi to get you surfing online in hotspots. This is no iPod touch, but then Cowon never intended it to be: this is a media player for musics fans first, with an OLED screen for some easy video watching on the side. Is this a combination that still cuts it in 2010? Find out in our full Cowon J3 review.
Read the rest of our Cowon J3 review
Cowon J3 review: Design, build and screen
Cowon J3 review: Music and video skills
Cowon’s struck a different path to the iPod and Zunes of the PMP world: its line of media players may have not changed the world, but for a certain audience they can’t be bettered, and the South Korean company’s latest, the Cowon J3, is no different. While it won’t provide over the air media downloads and all the extra bells and whistles of an iPod + iTunes setup, for those who don’t like to play in Apple’s walled garden, it’s ideal.
We’ve got mixed feelings about the Cowon J3’s build, we have to admit. We were wowed by the press photography when it was first announced earlier this year: it promised to be one beautiful aluminium clad tune chucker. In reality, it’s mostly a smudgy, plastic affair, bar one metal trim along the bottom, with a bezel that feels as wide as the iPad’s.
The Cowon J3 more than makes up by virtue of its weight however: it’s shockingly light compared to an iPod touch, and despite the width of its 3.3-inch screen, something you could easily strap to your arm for gym workouts. The ports and buttons are well placed, with track controls on the left, a 3.5mm audio hole along the bottom for your own cans, and a microSD slot so you can bolster the 16GB of storage with up to 32GB more, enough for thousands of tunes.
And then of course, there’s the screen. Like the Cowon S9 before it, the Cowon J3 boasts a dazzling OLED display more eye popping than a pug dog left in a vacuum. It’s a touchscreen, and even capable of pinch to zoom gestures on pictures, and gives deep and rich colour reproduction traditional TFT screens can’t match. Indoors, videos look lush, and even outdoors – a common weakspot for OLED screens – visibility is decent, let down more by the reflective glass over the top than anything else.
The Cowon J3 doesn’t get fussy about the video you try and play either, burning through just about any AVI or MP4 file you care to dump on it, and it’s this media format support combined with sound quality that Cowon’s famed for. It’ll play MP3, WMA and even FLAC files which should sate music fans with large digital music collections that aren’t stored in iTunes, and sound quality is unsurprisingly stunning. The internal speaker is weak, but with the bundled (a tad plasticky) headphones or your own plugged it’s deep, rich and nearly unmatchable at this price point.
In other words, this is one of the friendliest MP3 players out there for the iTunes phobic. Despite the similar cost and size, the Cowon J3 is not an iPod touch rival. Its UI is at times baffling, and in fact, when it tries to move into iPod touch territory, it fails miserably (There’s a memopad with an awful on screen keyboard, and a Flash player that requires you to preload the Cowon J3 with FLV files. Good luck with that.)
But for all those resistant to Apple’s ecosystem and way of working, the Cowon J3 is perfect. An OLED screen, wide format support, regular USB file drag and drop, expandable storage and top notch audio quality make a great package for audiophiles who watch the occasional video download on the train. The changes don’t merit an upgrade from the Cowon S9, but if you had your eyes on last year’s Sony Walkman X series, the Cowon J3 is certainly a better choice.
Cowon J3 review unit supplied by advancedmp3players.co.uk
Read the rest of our Cowon J3 review
Cowon J3 review: Design, build and screen
Cowon J3 review: Music and video skills
