COWON Q5W

COWON Q5W

Cowon's most ambitious product to date, the Cowon Q5W, is a super-charged, touch-screen portable video player (PVP) with an astounding list of features. The Cowon Q5W comes with a hefty price tag ($549 for 40GB, $599 for 60GB), however, and its dense, needlessly complicated feature set may overwhelm some users.

With a recessed 5-inch wide-screen display and elegant metal construction, the Cowon Q5W looks like a Cowon D2 on steroids. Considering that the Q5W comes in at nearly a pound of unwieldy metal girth--measuring 5.5 inches wide, 3.5 inches high, and 0.8 inch thick--it would also make a decent weapon should you choose to hurl it at someone. The Cowon Q5W's 5-inch touch screen (800x480 resolution) is both beautiful and responsive.The top edge of the Cowon Q5W includes conveniently located buttons for controlling volume, a power switch that doubles as a hold button for disabling onscreen controls, two built-in speakers, an infrared sensor for the included remote control, and a pinhole microphone for creating voice recordings. A useful (often necessary) stylus pen for the Q5W's touch screen is conveniently housed in the top-right edge of the player. Packed into the left edge of the Q5W are jacks for a 3.5mm headphone cable, a 2.5mm headset cable (for voice recording), a power adapter input, a USB-to-PC port, a USB host port, and the oddest feature of all: a fragile, retractable antenna that we first thought was for the FM radio, but is actually used for Wi-Fi reception. The back, bottom, and right edge of the Q5W are bare, save a small proprietary port on the bottom for the player's AV cable output and optional GPS dock. The Q5W supports an extensive list of acceptable audio and video formats (including DivX, XVID, WMV, MPEG, and audio formats such as MP3, WMA, WAV, ASF, OGG, FLAC, APE, MPC), but chokes on AAC, h.264, MKV, VOB, and MOV files. Beyond the in-depth audio and video playback features, the Cowon Q5W includes a built-in FM radio, standalone Flash file player (presumably for games), photo viewer, text reader, and voice recorder. The Q5W also includes a suite of Microsoft applications that run natively on its Windows CE 5 operating system, including MSN Messenger, Internet Explorer, WordPad (which makes the text reader somewhat redundant), and a couple of card games.