Cowon A3: portable media par excellence

iPods may have a monopoly in the portable media market, but their feature sets and sound quality have always been ‘good enough’ rather than spectacular. In this sense, the Cowon A3 is the iPod’s antithesis. Its chunky, and its menu system could best be described as functional, but it has a features list an arm long and its multimedia playback is simply phenomenal.

Measuring 133 x 78.5 x 22mm, the A3 is a tad too large to fit in your back pocket. But we’re yet to see a PMP with a four-inch screen that can. The A3 isn’t really a device for casual media consumption, but if you’re going on holiday and need a way to amuse yourself for several hours, it makes for an excellent travel companion. The 60GB hard drive is small for a device this size, but it’s enough to fit nine full length movies and several hours worth of music.

Portable media players can usually play a handful of different audio and video codecs, but the Cowon supports nearly every file format – save for tracks with digital rights management applied. This includes the usual suspects like MP3, WMA, AAC, WMV and MPEG-4-SP, and extends to lossless audio formats like FLAC and True Audio, as well as DivX (up to version 6), MKV (an increasingly popular codec for movies on file-sharing networks) and unencrypted VOB (the format used by DVDs).

We loaded a test library of WMA and MP3 files of varying bit-rates, and we were blown away by the quality of playback. Music sounded clearer, fuller and richer than on any other digital audio player we’ve tested, with throbbing bass and excellent treble.

But unless you’re an audiophile, you probably won’t notice the difference unless you’ve got something to compare it to. Video, on the other hand, is easily compared to a television, and the clarity and sharpness of the A3’s movie playback is akin to that of a tiny LCD TV. Display resolution on the four-inch screen is 800 x 480, but it can downscale videos up to 1280 x 720 in size.

Next to outstanding picture quality, the best thing about the A3’s video feature is the extensive codec support. Most other portable media players only support a couple of different video formats – and not the ones commonly used on file-sharing networks – so you usually have to transcode them to the compatible format before transferring it to the player. The A3, on the other hand, was able to play every file in our test library, even the Matroska file, which our PS3 wasn’t able to open.

Unfortunately, the speaker on the A3 is weak - even for personal listening – so you’re best off using the 3.5mm headphone jack or connecting it to a stereo. On that note, the A3 is well-equipped for external connections, with support for composite, S-Video and component output using the supplied cables – a noteworthy departure from the iPod, which charges an extra hundred bucks (or thereabouts) for each different type of connection. You can also set the A3 to record shows off a television, schedule recording for a later date and record audio directly from another source using the line-in port.

Another handy feature for travellers is USB host. This is mainly for copying photos off a digital camera using the supplied USB adapter, but we found it only worked on certain models. Of the point-and-shoots we tried, it worked for Pentax, Olympus and Panasonic, but not Canon, Kodak and Nikon. USB flash drives can also be used.

Mobile device menu systems have improved in leaps and bounds in the last five years, but the A3’s GUI looks like something from the last decade. It’s perfectly functional, and for the most part doesn’t require too many button presses to get to particular features and settings, but the menu system isn’t far removed from a command line, with everything organised and presented in a logical folder hierarchy.

The A3’s Achilles heel is battery life. Cowon claims the A3 is good for seven hours of video and nine hours of audio, but in our testing we got fours for video and the same for audio – even with the screen off. Worse, the battery isn’t replaceable.