I almost forgot to mention that I received the Cowon D2 that I ordered recently. It's a great little PMP that plays many audio and video formats out there today. I only care about vorbis playback as that is what most of my music library is encoded in. My previous player, my iRiver clix was getting on my nerves somewhat. Little things like losing the on-the-go playlists whenever the battery died, or even after charging sometimes got on my nerves. It was a replacement for my previous PMP, a Cowon iAudio X5 (which I broke, lost, found, didn't fix and then got tired of).
The X5's battery wasn't holding a charge any more so instead of replacing the battery I bought the Clix. At the time the choice was between the Clix and the D2. I believe I chose the Clix based on looks and capacity at the time. I've been looking for a reason to go back to Cowon for a while now because the sound quality on their players is awesome. I'm basing that statement both on experience with the X5 and reviews on the net. Their offerings hadn't really impressed and I was waiting on something "revolutionary" in their lineup to jump back onto the bandwagon.
Enter the Q5W in all its touchscreened goodness. I initially was looking at it and the competing Archos 605/705 products. I ruled out the Archos' because of their addon functionality model (pay for more). And I ruled out the Q5W strictly because of it's reported weight and being a bit on the pricy side for me. Truth be told though it was mostly the weight that was an issue for me.
This prompted a return once again to the D2 and I chose it based on the touchscreen, HD space (and ability to add more storage via SDHC cards) and superior format support. Want to hear the really scary part? This odyssey was initially begun as I tried to decide between an iPod touch and the iPod Classic. The deal breaker there was the same old same old. No support for vorbis, or even allowing 3rd party devs to add support. Also rockbox status on the touch was nil, and storage was low. Rockbox status on the classic didn't seem that far along to me either so I said screw Jobs' player (once again).
Once I settled on the D2 I went back and compared to the iPod again. Comparing it to a nano, it's superior in every way:
- more compact
- better audio fidelity
- price
- audio and video codecs support AND most importantly
- playback time.
The D2 gets a whopping 2 straight days of non-stop audio playback. Cowon's site says up to 52 hours, so we know in the real world that like 48hrs. In normal usage than could be up to a week before needing to recharge. That, boys and girls, is awesome. That's why I finally gave in and got me a Cowon iAudio D2, and now that I have it -- I'm lovin' it.