Cowon V5 HD 16 GB Personal Media Player

Temp/moz-screenshot.png" alt="" />The world of personal media players might be in trouble according to some folks, what with the mobile phone now able to do everything a PMP can. But there will always be a niche of brands that offer quality, and albeit are priced more. Cowon has carved out this reputation for themselves, they have some really god players. Today we have the V5 HD by Cowon, so let’s see if it can hold the flag up waving high.

Design
Available in the box are a pair of earphones, a small CD, manual, warranty card, adapter and USB cable, which has a proprietary connector on one end. This irritates me for the obvious reasons: what if the cable gets lost? The connector actually doubles up as the HDMI and also the SPDIF out, the cables of which were not included in our package. The unit itself is slightly heavy, not too conducive to carry straight in the pocket, plus the screen is not protected. But the complaints end there in the design section, as the flat rectangular form factor is seamless, and very clean looking.

The screen is a large 4.8 inch, digital TFT LCD touch screen. 800 x 400 is the resolution, while brightness is 400cd/㎡. The left side has the USB port for PC connectivity hidden behind a panel, along with a slot for SD card. The other side has 3.5mm earphone socket and the adapter socket.
Back to the touch screen. The main USP is that  the resolution of video that can be viewed is 720p, which comes under the realm of HD video. It has album art visualizations, EQ section and also has an image viewer (JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF, BMP, RAW) and other stuff like  a calculator and a .TXT file reader for eBooks in that format. The text size can be adjusted in size and color as well. The player charges via the adapter, and takes about 3 hours to be fully charged. Last but not least, there is a voice recorder option. Now what it doesn’t have: No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, thus many apps included in it will be pointless.

Specifications
Video Resolution       800 x 400, Max res: 1280x720
OS                             Windows CE 6.0
Max Output               16 Ohm earphones : 30mW + 30mW
File formats               (video) AVI, WMV, ASF, MP4, MATROSKA(MKV), OGM, MPG/MPEG, DAT,
                                 (audio)  MP3/2/1, WMA, ASF, AC3, FLAC, OGG, M4A, MATROSKA (MKA), TTA, APE,
                                  MPC, WV, WAV
Codecs                      H.264 (MPEG4-AVC) MPEG 1, MPEG 2, VC-1, WMV 9, AC3, WMA
Size                           128 x 22 x 15.7 (w x h x d)
Weight                      197 g