Cowon Z2 (16GB) Review

Apple’s iPod Touch has been the king of the PMP market, eversince it launched and there are no two ways about that. We’ve had media players come and go, but none have been able to challenge the simplicity and ease of use of the iPod Touch and the whole credit goes to the Operating System. The reason why everyone has failed so far is because their interface was not a match for iOS and being proprietary, the lack of apps was also a problem. If anyone can put up a good fight against iOS, it has to be Android. Cowon’s latest Z2 portable media player (PMP) seems like the perfect alternative to Apple’s iPod Touch, at least on paper. Let’s see if can manage to take down the reigning king of PMPs. 

On video: Cowon Z2 (16GB)

Simple looks

There’s a single button on the top for sleep/wake function, while the right side plays host to the volume rocker, as well as media shortcut buttons for Play/Pause, Rewind and FastForward. This means you need not wake the Z2 up to start playing a song, which is clever. Down at the bottom, we have the 3.5mm headphone jack and a flap that hides the micro USB charging port, microSD card slot and HDMI-out port. All in all, very good connectivity options. The only thing missing from this, when compared to the iPod Touch is the front and rear camera. The flap can also be adjusted into a stand, which could come handy when watching videos. There’s a microphone on the side a speaker grill there the earpiece would go. It’s designed in such a way, so you can use it as phone to make VoIP calls.

HDMI and microSD card slot for good measure

Cowon bundles the Z2 with a charger, earphones and some instruction manuals.

Interface
This is where it all comes together. The Cowon Z2 runs on Android 2.3.5, along with their custom interface called Plenue. The customization is done very well and everything, right from the boot animation to the icons to the customs widgets, it looks and feels modern and fresh. There are plenty of widgets to choose from, as well, in order to customize the look of the Z2.There are five home screens in all, but you can’t add or remove any of them. The notification bar also comes with handy toggle switches for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Clear RAM and Sleep. Like most Android devices, you get capacitive buttons at the bottom for Options, Home and Back. Unfortunately, they aren’t backlit, but once you know which button is where, it shouldn’t be much of a problem. While the interface is quick, I wouldn’t call is slick, as the menu animations aren’t as smooth as we would have liked. It’s still better than most PMP’s in the market, though.

A very good looking skin

Coming to the technical bit, the Cowon Z2 is powered by a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU, along with a dedicated VPU (video processing unit) NEON for playing back Full HD videos and finally, a Mali 200 GPU for graphics and rendering the interface. Along with 512 MB of RAM, this is a very potent mix of hardware, which makes the Z2 eat 1080p videos for breakfast.

Easy to navigate and use

The 3.7-inch (800 x 480) screen is also of the AMOLED type, which gives it nice saturated colours and good viewing angles with deep blacks. Although the Z2 doesn't officially support the Google Play store, you can install the APK and then gain access to all the apps in the store.