The Cowon P5: A Haptic Touchscreen Media Player
Cowon has unleashed the P5 in the not-so-crowded market of touchscreen personal media players (PMP). It is targeted more at video users, offering a 5 inch 800×480 pixel touchscreen display with haptic feedback. The design is pretty nice and quite similar to the Archos line of PMPs and several UMPCs.
To speed things up in the interface and playback department, the P5 uses a fast 700Mhz processor to decode full DVD-resolution videos, both offline and online through the built-in DMB tuner (for now, it’s limited in Korea).
The video formats supported include WMV, MPG, OGM, DivX, Xvid, MPEG4, WMV9, AVI, ASF, MP3, WMA, and AC3. Pretty comprehensive and basically covers every common formats available. There are three choices based on capacity: 40, 60, 80GB hard drive, with three color hues to select from: black, red, and silver aluminum.
Cable-haters can enjoy the boon of its Bluetooth 2.0 that can be used for earphones and peripherals. No built-in Wi-Fi to surf the Net out of the box, although it is available separately for purchase. P5 has pretty good endurance, capable of running 14 hours of music or nine hours of video before it requires charging.
Pretty interesting stuff and it should give some people a different alternative to the Ipod Touch. Just hope it’s priced sensibly.
