Comments on Cowon iAudio 7 (4GB)

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Liam3

10:26 PM on 17 November, 2009

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This is a player designed by engineers. There are two important consequences of this. The first is that it has almost every feature you could possibly want from a portable audio device and more again, and they all work absolutely perfectly. The sound is fantastic, the level of support for codeces is awesome, the fact that it has a radio, an line in and a mic, things that are so convenient, all this is wonderfull.These guys reallythough about the product spec when they put this thing together. If al you care about is sound though, you would be hard pressed to do better than this device.





Unfortunately, the user interface is a complete afterthought. The top-level menu looks nice enough (though a bit dated now) but the rest of it is a complete mess. There is no consistency between the operation of the menus and the relationships between the buttons. You have to constantly think about which button to press depending on the context. Worse, the touch sensitive buttons on the from seem like a good idea, but actually, they area complete pain in the arse. All you have to do is think about picking the thing up the wrong way during playback and you will hit a button, causing the thing to pause, skip a track, or trigger the playback loop button. Particularly a problem if like me you operate these kinds of devices from inside a jacket pocket. Why they have a track skip instead of volume control on the from panel I have no idea, and to operate both together requires two hands or a lot of shuffling about of the player in one hand. The form factor does not help, making it impossible for the designers to place the buttons in a way which would make them easily accessible in single-handed mode.





Apple are the most successful media player manufacturers on the planet for lots of reasons but a big one is that they design products that even a humanities graduate can grapple with easily. Cowon need to get user interface design people on these projects before a single drawing is even made.





Summary: its cheaper than the equivalent Nano, and has waaaaay more features. If sound is important, had to beat. User interface is terrible, but just about manageable.