Dedicated, and portable, media players seem to have gone out when tablets and smartphones started invading our lives in earnest. Why pay for a gadget that just plays media when you can have one that does that in addition to allowing you to play Angry Birds? Well, these devices are still making market inroads thanks to innovative product design and rich feature-sets.
Korean company Cowon is finally releasing their well reviewed X9 portable media player in the good ole US of A. The X9, which comes in either black or white, measures 72.5mm wide, 114.9mm tall and weighs in at 159 grams. That’s a pretty pocket friendly size. It also features a 4.3-inch touchscreen, your choice of either 8GB, 16GB or 32GB of internal flash memory and even a MicroSD slot. The ability to add new memory when you run out is something tablets and smartphones could learn a lot from.
The company also says the device will give you 110 hours of music playback on single charge. If true, that is fairly astounding. My phone seems to last for about 2 hours these days. Video playback will net you around 13 hours of dedicated playtime. Supported formats include MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, APE, WAV, XviD, WMV and ASF. That’s another improvement over the functionality typically found in phones and tablets. They like to steer clear of several popular video and audio formats. You’ll have no such trouble with the X9.
So yeah. Dedicated media players can be useful in 2012. Cowon’s wondergadget is available now for the, well, kind of expensive price of $230. Watch the unboxing video below to see if this gadget seems up your alley.
