Cowon S9 8 GB

Cowon has long had a good reputation for the top quality audio on its MP3 players, but has enjoyed less success with the touchscreen interfaces needed to run them.

Things might be about to change with the new S9, which is a direct competitor of Samsung's P3, the Sony NWZ-X1000 and, of course, Apple's iPod Touch.

A player that's as classy as its packaging

The stylish thin packaging that the S9 comes is a surprisingly thin proposition, and the same goes for the player itself.  The matte surface on the back of the S9 curves inwards, giving a classy finish that is a long way from the chrome on the iPod Touch and all of the scratch and greasy fingerprints that it's associated with.  The top of the player includes a volume control, a play/pause button and the traditional back and forward buttons.  At last: a touchscreen player that you can use without taking it out of your pocket to change tracks.

The interface, entirely developed in Flash, is also quite successful.  The responsive touchscreen gives access to all of the player's features.  Cowon has finally improved on the screen of the D2, which was so poinful to use.

Great sound quality is there too

Cowon continues to provide excellent audio quality on its music players.  The S9 is an incremental improvement on the D2, placing it very high amongst other media players.  The interface takes a little getting used to, but becomes very intuitive after a while.  With updated firmware, the S9 offers gapless playback, meaning there are no pauses between lossless formats, and only a very small gap with compressed playback.

It's worth changing the headphones to make the most of the S9.  They're almost exactly the same ones that were supplied with the X5 a while back.  It's worth nothing that the S9 is compatible with Bluetooth headphones.  There's also an FM tune, but no RDS.

However, the S9's real strong point when it comes to audio is without doubt the way it processes sound.  The BBE effects were already excellent, but the new BBE+ system is even more impressive.  You need to have a look through the settings and try it out for a few minutes, but you can save up to four different profiles.  If you use them wisely, the different improvements can really change the quality of the sound that you're listening to.

Video shines on

When you look at the 3.3'' on the S9, your first reaction is that if Cowon ever gets round to shipping a player with a 5'' AMOLED screen, then Archos will have to watch out.  It's one of the best we've ever seen on a portable player, with bright, faithful colours and very wide viewing angles.  There's more good news: the S9 has a powerful enough processor to play 720p HD video without re-encoding it first.  Of course, the files are large, but you don't have to spend hours waiting for your computer to prepare your videos.

You can also look at photos, and use Flash-based applications, which means there are plenty of games to play on the bus.  The battery life claimed by Cowon is an impressive 55 hours of audio playback and 11 hours of video.  We measured 52 hours and 10 hours respectively for these two applications, which is perfectly reasonable.  Finally, for transfers, you can either use UMS or MTP.

If there is a such a thing as an iPod Touch-killer, then it's the Cowon S9.  It still has some problems--like the fact that it can't read AAC files--but it's so at home with both audio and video, which is, after all, what you want from a portable multimedia player.  On top of that come the different interface options and the applications developed by the Cowon community which is pretty active.