The choice wasn't easy, but a few days ago I ordered my iAudio 6 and it arrived yesterday. In short, it is an mp3-player with 4GB capacity and, judged from the few hours that I have had it, it seems to live up to the expectations. Read on if you want to know why, see pictures and read the full review.

Update May 18, 2006: Firmware 1.20 has been released and can be downloaded from here. It works fine for me and although the startup time (see below) has not improved much, the general response seems quicker. There also are some new things in the settings menu, e.g. a choice of another USB-protocol and browsing by filename or ID3-tag.

Read below in the comments for the more updates.

Introduction and Specs

In principle, an mp3-player simply has to make music files easily accessible and play them in good quality. The iAudio 6 surely succeeds nicely in doing that. However, there are always some details to tell and this text contains my personal "end-consumer" opinions about this device. I took the images myself and must say in advance that the screenshots do not do justice to the display in real-life. I hope this is useful if you consider to get this newly released device.

First of all, let's list the most important specs:

• It is called "iAudio 6" and made by Cowon which have a good reputation of making high quality audio devices.
• It has 4GB of memory in a mini-harddisk.
• It plays MP3, OGG and some others I don't care about (WMA, WAV and even FLAC).
• File transfer via standard USB-storage, works therefore fine with Linux.
• The color display has 160x180 pixels and is clear and bright.
• The user-interface works via a touch-sensitive surface.
• It is USB-host capable.
• It plays videos (mp4-avi).
• It can show images and display text-files.
• It has a built-in radio
• Different languages are supported and there is a clock for timed recordings or wake-up.
• Recording can be done via the built-in microphone or line-in.
• It is charged via USB.

Appearance and package contents

As you can see in the image above, it has rather similar dimensions to flash-players. It is a little unclear why a harddisk is used to have 4GB of memory - this amount can elsewhere be found in players that use flash instead. They even use this fact for advertising which I would have understood if the smaller size of the new harddrives would have shrunk harddisk-players while keeping a capacity of 20GB or more.

Apart from the player itself, the package contains earphones, a USB-cable, a USB-host cable, a cable for line-in, a very short and basic manual and a CD with some software (useless because it's for Windows) and more elaborate manuals as PDFs for different languages. Still, the manual is not very good, in my opinion, because the things that you don't find out intuitively without manual are not very well covered.

I was very pleased to see a card in the package that said "100 Free Downloads at EMusic.com", because I am already a customer at EMusic which is the best available place to buy music on the net, in plain mp3-format without DRM restrictions. However, when opening the page given on the card (http://www.emusic.com/cowon) it became clear that these 100 downloads are only for new customers, instead of the 25 trial downloads that you get regularly. Since there is no test if you really have a Cowon-player or not, I recommend registering via the link above and get 75 more free tracks. My dispappointment about the lack of free downloads for myself was replaced by the insight that, at least, they make advertising for the right download-service.

Usage

Next to the display, there are the touch-sensitive areas that are used to navigate the menus and directories. The long diagonal area is used for scrolling. One can either swipe along it or hold at one of the ends for continuous scrolling.

The first of the two bottons beside the scrollbar is for "play/pause" or "enter menu/folder" while the other is for "record" or "leave menu/folder". When holding the "play"-button for a short while, a popup window allows for additional actions, depending on context.

Generally the response is very fast when navigating menus or folders. Choosing a new track for playback is not instant because the harddisk has to reach the right place, but the lag is small. The only significant waiting time is when turning on the iAudio 6. This takes 10 seconds after the button is held long enough - I find this rather long. Strangely enough, this seems to vary and sometimes it is significantly faster. Hopefully this will be improved with firmware updates.

On one of the long narrow sides, there are 4 sturdy feeling buttons: a slider for turning it on/off and setting it to "HOLD" (deactivates all other input). Two buttons are exclusively for volume up and down. The last one, situated in the middle, allows to switch between the modes "current song" (or image/radio/video, depending on what you do right now), "browse folder/files" (or radio station) and the "main menu".

The latter is where one chooses between the different things that the player can do. Reading texts or watching images does not interrupt music playback. The main menu has nice eye-candy animations and follows the diagonal orientation of the scrollbar that is used to select an item.

Data transfer is done via standard USB-storage which means that there ist no driver or proprietary software needed to get file on and off the player. This was a prerequisite for me since this guarantees the operation with Linux without hassle. It is also very fast (USB 2.0) to fill the player.

Listening

The most important task, of course, is to play music. And the iAudio 6 does this in very good quality. I have no means to judge this objectively, but be assured that it sounds very good. The earphones that come along in the package are also surprisingly good and are capable of some significant bass.

There are many options for tweaking the sound. There is a 5-band equalizer with several presets and the possibility to save custom setups. In addtion, there are several sound-effects ("extra bass", "clearer sound", pseudo-3D) that not only can be turned on or off, but also varied in strength. I have not yet figured out what the use of playing songs faster/slower or with different volumes for left/right could be, but it is possible.

While playing, the display by default shows the usual artist/title/track information. By swiping the scollbar, it is possible to scan inside the current song, while tipping at either end skips to the next/previous track.

So how do you choose what music is played? If you simply navigate in your folder structure and hit "play", it will subsequently play all songs that are available. It is possible to change this in the "settings" menu to be limited to the current folder, or to randomise the play-back. Funnily, the folders are not displayed alphabetically, but in the order they were loaded onto the harddisk. I will check if changing the time-stamp of the files will change this.

Bookmarks can be set anywhere and in a large number. It is not needed to do this if one simply wants to continue where it was turned off. Enabling "Resume" will make it start play-back right after turning it back on.

Apart from the bookmark-mechanism, there is the so-called "Dynamic Playlist" (DPL). Like the bookmarks, this is a virtual folder in the root-directory and simply contains the tracks that have been added to it. Adding can be easily done with a hotkey. However, the switch from "normal" (folder-based) play-back to the DPL is not solved very good: one has to navigate from the current to the root-folder to do this.

Customisation

Apart from tweaking the sound itself there are quite a few options for customising the iAudio 6. Here are a few:

• Change the background image of the play-back screen to any picture you upload.
• Choose actions that are done when certain buttons are help pressed.
• Getting rid of the annoying click-sound that is enabled by default
• Change the step-size when scanning inside a song
• Language and timer options
• Display options
• Choose recording source and quality

USB-Host

While using the USB-host mode, one can navigate folders on the iAudio 6 and on the slave-device. Copying is done by navigating to the file or folder that is to be copied, marking it with a keypress, navigating to the target folder and saying "insert here".

I have only tested it with my card-reader and it worked fine, but incredibly slow. I do not know if a slave-device with an own energy source will speed this up, but since I will use most of the space for music anyway, I will not use it much for photography.

Text

The iAudio 6 can display text-files on its screen. This can be used for song-lyrics or for whatever file. The font is easily readable and one can jump to a certain line. Most probably, I will never need this. :-)

Videos

This is also true for the video-capability. Yes, it works, but films have to be converted by a (Windows-) programm first. Although I was positively surprised by what one can see on 160x180 pixels, I doubt that I will ever watch a movie on it.

Radio

I have only used this shortly so far, but it can scan for stations and save them as presets. It is easy to switch between presets. Maybe, I will finally check out Swedish radio.

Recording

The recordings, either from radio or from line-in, are encoded on the fly and the quality (bitrate) is adjustable separatly. One can tell it to make a new file if there is a pause over a certain length. Unfortunately, they chose the wrong format to encode to, namely WMA.

Final Words

I think the iAudio 6 is a very nice piece of hardware and I think I will not regret my choice. I will update this page when additional points worth mentioning come up. Have also a look at the comments below which may contain additional information.

Buying

All the Swedish internet-based shops started shipping simultaneously last week. I bought mine at MYCOM without problems.

Further Reading

• iAudio international homepage
• Swedish iAudio homepage
• Short Review at CNET