COWON S9 3.3" 32GB MP3 / MP4 Player

Pros: As the title says, it plays MP3s, its screen is pretty decent, but it gets really picky when it comes to video or pictures. It only plays DX50 Divx AVIs videos and JPEG iamges.

It can display text files, but that is it, no complex text files or documents like PDF or ODF.

Has FM but no AM radio.

Its UI is not quite as intuitive as I expected, and I'm pretty tech savy. It also requires a tiny finger to hit the buttons correctly or else you accidentally delete a file (and I have pretty tiny fingers already). You can not use a pencil eraser or anything else to hit the buttons.

Cons: If you want to rotate the screen, you have to physically rotate the screen so that it automatically detects the gravity (which it does not do so well at times, you have to shake it sometimes).

It has its own special USB cable, but its not been much of a problem, though it is difficult to plug its own cable in at times.

The battery lasts quite long and charges well and it plugs right into any Linux as a flash drive/USB storage device (Ubuntu Linux works best), there are quite a lot of problems installing drivers if you plan to use this with Windows.

Too many IO calls to the drive can lock up your system so don't edit files on it, copy it off to the hard drive first.

Other Thoughts: Overall, I don't recommend it if you really want to play videos or display images/pictures. If you just want an MP3 player, this will work, but then its screen becomes pointless.

Pros: Amazing sound and video quality. everything can be tweaked to your liking

Cons: do NOT try to mount this in GNU/Linux. There is a known issue with the data transfer process that the device handles things "weird". Cowon worked with MS and set up the process. If you mount and file transfer in GNU/Linux, you will have the player brick. It happened to my first one, luckily newegg was good about the RMA process and got me a new one. I just mount and file transfer and windows, and it is no problem.

Pros: Great sound quality, it is truly outstanding, I cannot directly compare to Ipood, since I lost my 3GS, but I would say that there is more detail in the highend and lowend. Steady stream of firmware updates.

Cons: User interface still in development

Other Thoughts: Oh and the OLED screen is nice, but I consider this a music player first and formost. The Beatles remastered FLAC on this pmp was heavenly. Paired with Weststone UM3X, please ditch the stock earbuds!

Pros: Absolutely beautiful screen, completely scratch resistant with no protection. Can keep keys+this in same pocket. Great sound. GREAT battery life. Decent ordering system

Cons: One big problem for me is scrolling...on an iPhone or something the kinetic scrolling works perfectly, this thing can never tell whether Im trying to scroll quickly or stop it from scrolling, and it results in a very jittery scroll down.

NO SEARCH FUNCTION that I have found.

You really need to download a media transcoder even though this thing covers MANY formats, it is picky about certain aspects of the format. Lack of wifi makes this hard to buy instead of an ipod touch, so think of it as a better ipod video.

Other Thoughts: it's not a mac product

Pros: Great Audio/Video quality, awesome screen, blutooth, easy to upload material

Cons: Jetaudi software that comes with it isn't that great. Make sure you have a good video encoder for your files, the one that comes with it is worthless...

No WIFI (If you need it...)

Other Thoughts: I'm happy with my purchase so far... Uploading files to the S9 is a breeze, with drag and drop function. Video and Audio are great! The screen is very crisp and clear. I actually chose this over the others because of the bluetooth capabilities. I have a bluetooth speaker system in my car, and this was a must. WiFi did not matter, as my phone can handle that. If you don't care about all the needeless apps, try out this actual "media player".

Pros: -AMAZING sound
-Very lightweight (doesn't feel cheap, just light)
-Beautiful screen - LOVE the AMOLED technology put to use on an mp3 player!
-The flash UI is cool, but not amazing
-Bluetooth
-Lots of cool apps that come with the player
-SUPPORTS .FLAC!!
-The buttons on the top of the player are SO amazing. I can change song/volume without taking it out of my pocket, and turning on the screen

Cons: -WHY would such a high quality player come with such low quality head phones???
-No wifi - it will be impossible to keep up with iTouch without at least that...

Other Thoughts: This is such a great mp3 player. I hope that some day we will have this as an option in actual stores, instead of just Zunes and iPods. This is an incredible alternative, and such a reasonable price! This thing NEEDs to come with some real earbuds, because the ones it comes with distort at 15 (out of 40) volume playing Baba O'Riley... But plug it into a nice sound system, and it sounds live. I'm NOT an audiophile, but i can still tell the difference between this and my old zune. hopefully future models will have the options (wifi, addable apps, bigger screen, etc.) to jump into the battle of the mp3 players, but the LED screen is a BIG start! LOVE it!

Another thing, i didn't even install the program that comes with it, because i use songbird, but its been slightly problematic. They need to get a nice piece of software to use, because the zune software was terrible. i love iTunes, but songbird needs some work before it gets there.

Pros: - Drag and drop compatible (which mean it's Linux / Mac compatible)
- Large music codec support (including OGG Vorbis and FLAC)
- Large community forum for help as well as user-created themes
- AMOLED screen is fantastic looking
- XVID video support
- Frequent firmware updates (a recent one added gapless playback, for example)
- Fantastic sound quality, thanks to the extensive EQ settings offered
- Excellent battery life
- Tactile controls for volume, pause, FF / RW. You can even leave those active if you put the player into a locked state, if you want

Cons: - Proprietary USB cable! I hate those.
- Default UI is not very intuitive or smooth (luckily, you an change it a bit via a theme alteration)

Other Thoughts: I love this player - it does XVID, OGG Vorbis, FLAC and sounds / looks great. But don't expect it to match the Touch or Zune HD's UI, because it doesn't even come close. And there's no Wifi or App Store, so it's really not in the same market as those players.

Pros: Excellent battery life, beautiful AMOLED display, Compatible with all OS types that can mount FAT32 partitions. Ability to play FLASH applications. Auto adjusts the screen when you tilt the player. Nice size and lite weight. Video player responds wonderfully. The audio is superb.
Menus can be customized.

Cons: GUI interface is cumbersome and almost annoying with navigation. If you turn the interface to the side, it switched to album mode. If you don't have the cover art, then there is no way to tell what albums your looking at. It is best to use the browser to play songs. There is no option in the setting that I can find (firmware 2.41) that support defaulting icons to text titles.

Almost all the menus are ICON driven, so you it isn't intuitive. You will have to check the manual several time to figure out what all the icons do. No text popups or help options.

The placement of the button and jacks are inconvenient.

The interface looks like USB micro but in fact is a USB 20pin serial cable that is being used in Asia. So, you will need to take the cable with you if you plan to charge else where or sync.

You can't listen to the player when it is charging. It enters a sync mode. So it's either charge it, or play it.

The menu and interface can be customized, but requires FLASH

Other Thoughts: All in all, it is a great player with storage aplenty. The interface is annoying. Almost as if dyslexics created it, but might improve with future firmware revisions.
Only other down side is another cable interface type to deal with. Why can't these companies agree on one standard so I don't have to have a ball of 30 USB data/power cables?

Pros: Audio fidelity is outstanding, and depending on the source (flac, etc) blows other units out of the water. Play time is also phenomenal - more than 40hrs between charges

Cons: Operating functions take a bit of getting used to....

Other Thoughts: What a great player, well made and very small

Pros: This thing has so much space that I easily fit all my music, an entire season of ghost in the shell, and my audio books onto it. The real beauty of the S9 isn't the space though, but the amazing battery life. I charge this thing about once a week with at least five hours of use each day.

Cons: There is a slight delay for the screen to switch when tilting it, but not so much as to merit losing an egg.

Other Thoughts: Remember to actually check the battery life on this thing while you use it. I am so use to it being charged that sometimes I forgot it does have a battery and it goes dead while I am using it.