Cowon X7 160GB Portable Media Player - White

The Cowon X7 is supposed to be the "best MP3 player in the world", and it is easy to see why it has been given this tag. It has a massive capacity which is on a par with an Apple iPod classic 160GB - Silver, it has superb sound quality, which is what Cowon are famous for, and it has an astoundingly long amount of playback power (103 hours for music and 10 hours for video). It also has a great deal of features, such as an FM radio, a document viewer, a microphone, external speakers and various other nice touches.

The sound is a good place to start, It's phenomenal. Obviously the EU limits the volume of MP3 players now, so don't expect the loudness to be anything higher than normal, but the quality is fantastic. There is also a dizzying array of EQ settings you can use to edit the sound to compliment your music, which is very impressive. Another nice surprise was that along with my CD rips and Amazon MP3 songs, my iTunes store purchases actually worked on this player, which is something I did not expect! Video quality is not bad, but not brilliant, but I want this player for music rather than video, so it's not something that really bothers me too much (but a higher resolution screen would have been nice).

The external speakers are another impressive feature, and can reach quite loud volumes if you crank it up using the player's external volume controls. For small speakers they pack quite a punch! The microphone feature is a great added bonus too, and records much better than I thought it would.

Some have cited the unusual stretched-out album artwork effect the X7 creates when album covers are present, but this does not bother me personally. The only things that have proved to be negatives for me are the menu navigation (not particularly intuitive), and the software, which came bundled on a minidisc in the box. When you select "Music" at the main menu, you are taken to a Now Playing screen of the track you last played, and from there you have to press "Open" to get to the folder the track is contained in, and then "Up" or "Top" to navigate through the various categories of file storage (eg. Artist, Album, Genre, Year, etc). I'm getting used to it, but it's a bit clunky to say the least.

I really wanted to get the JetAudio Media Center set up so that I could add album cover art and edit other aspects of my music on the X7, so I tried to install the software. It installed and I then tried to get it running about 3 times on a playback + music management function, and it kept closing, my laptop informing me that it had encountered a problem and had to close, then annoying me for ages by pestering me to email Cowon about the problem. On about the fifth try of installing and uninstalling the pesky software, I managed to get it going, but found that it still had glitches which made it close down in the same way once you did something like connect the player, or try to edit an ID3 Tag. I'm probably going to uninstall it yet again and try and download it from the internet and see if the bugs have been fixed. I really hope so!

So some absolutely brilliant postives outweigh some slightly annoying negatives. If you are an audiophile and want to be able to carry around a massive amount of music and video on the go, then this could well be the player for you. If you want more, like Wi-Fi, internet browser, and more features this is probably not up your street. As it happens, it's pretty much just what I was looking for.

I ordered the Cowon X7 as I'd read reviews on G6 Ipod classic capped volume, and this was the only other MP3 player on the market with the same capacity. I really wanted to love this and hoped the out of stock delay was due to Cowon taking on board feedback and taking the time to implement software mods. Out of the box it looked great and felt high quality then I got the instruction manual out, and it went wrong from there!

Manual is very poor, but I worked out functionality after 15~30 minutes of trial and error.

Then I tried to load music - drag and drop they say!

2 nights and 8 hours later I had 4Gb of music on the player!

It locked up or timed out during transfer, with "Updating Database" message locked on screen requiring switch off / on to reset. This was followed by a HDD error on PC leading to scan disc before I could proceed.

I decided to give the player a try to see if the problems with HDD and file transfer were worth living with.
Sound quality as mentioned in many reviews is great with the EQ offering a wide range of presets.
But next I had problems with selecting albums / tracks, the scroll bar down the side is very narrow and more often than not I found I had selected an album and was scrolling through tracks rather than the album list.

The sensitivity of the touch screen isn't great and can't be adjusted either.

I use my MP3 player in the car on regular long journeys and this player is not easy to use on the road. (in fact it's dangerous!) album selection is not as easy to achieve as Ipod where a quick glance can tell you where you are up to when scrolling. (Due to reason mentioned above with location of very narrow scroll bar right at edge of screen)

So I'm afraid it was back in the box and returned, I'm now awaiting delivery of a new Ipod classic from the US, so hopefully no issue with volume cap!

The Cowon X7 has a heavy well built feel, (like a German car) and excellent sound quality let down only by a poorly thought out UI design.
Come on Cowon read the reviews and give Apple a run for their money you're half way there!