Students! You’re going to be spending a lot of time, on and off the quad, listening to music. I made it through college with an MP3-CD player, but that doesn’t mean you have to. Click through for our list of best MP3 players for a college student.
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After about a half-year break from making anything substantial, the well-rested Cowon has just announced two new portable media players. The S9, seen above, will be primarily geared towards light portable computing and more with a 3.3-inch 480×272 AMOLED display, 500 MHz dual-core CPU (Atom, possibly?), capacitive touchscreen, TV-out, voice recorder, digital TV (T-DMB), Bluetooth, and music/movie/photo/document viewers. It’s also got a built-in dictionary.

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I love these guys. They make good stuff. Their booth was pretty sparse, but the A3 and D2 were looking good in their little enclosures. The A3 (right) I’d seen before, and it was the D2 that caught my eye. It fit my hand well, the touchscreen was responsive, and the display was crisp and bright.

It looks like the perfect thing to carry around a ton of standard def videos on — YouTube silliness, .flvs downloaded from all over the net, and so on. Foreign stuff like this is always compatible with almost any format and is extremely customizable.

It struck me kind of funny that the web site Physorg.com ponders aloud whether or not the Cowon Q5W is "the iPhone of Personal Media Players" because of its "long list of features that far surpasses other gadgets of its kind."

I can kinda see where they’re coming from but it just sounds a little odd to call a media playing device what basically amounts to a phone-less iPhone and not be referring to the iPod Touch which is, in fact, basically the true iPhone of personal media players. 

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Gadgetaholic likes them some Cowon iAudio devices and this latest version, the iAudio 7, is making them very, very happy. It is a mini player that improves and enhances audio with on-board audio improvement technologies along with a 60 hour battery life.

It has a 160×128 TFT screen for video playback and line-in for recording. It can also display images and supports just about every lossless and lossy format known to man including OGG and FLAC. No price and it looks pretty Asia-only, but it’s a fun look at a cool little player.

Cowon iAudio 7 [Gadgetaholic]

Cowon’s L2 is an extraordinary convergence device. Almost to the point of obscenity. The unit features many of the things you’d expect in a modern-day mobile device made for the lucky people in Korea: DMB TV compatibility along with AVI and MPEG-4 video support, MP3, WAV, WMA support and an FM tuner for audio and support for JPEG, BMP and PNG image formats. All of this accessible through a 7-inch widescreen display with picture in picture.

Why would you need PiP? There’s also a GPS receiver built in, so you can view maps and video or photos or your music library perhaps, at the same time. There are 2GB of onboard flash memory and an SD slot for up to 2GB more. Not bad for around $320 US and certainly beats the piss out the 5G iPod’s features. And yet, even if it were to be available in the States, I still wouldn’t care. It’s too much “look what we can do” and too little “wow, this is useful.”

Cowon’s L2, you don’t know yet but you already need it [akihabaranews.com]

The new Cowon D2 is a pretty geeky-looking PMP that fits squarely (ok, rectangularly) in the palm of your hand, ready to play 30-fps video, photos, and music at the touch of a virtual button. With up to 4GB of internal flash storage plus an SD card slot–and a 50-hour battery life–the D2 can keep you mindlessly occupied for hours on end. That doesn’t include the time you’ll need to get familiar with the touchscreen-driven interface, though.
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