Cowon Q5W Video

Cowon Q5W Video Transcript

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>> Hey. I'm Donald Bell, senior editor for digital audio and MP3. And today we're taking a first look at the Cowon Q5W portable video player. This is the most super-duper feature packed video player we've ever gotten our hands on. It has not only the ability to play videos and music, but also has Bluetooth capability, WiFi Internet browser. It can act as a USB host for offloading digital photos onto your Q5W. You can also use it to play Flash video games. You can use it to listen to the radio. You can -- virtually endless amount you can do with this. And it's priced to match those features. It's $549.00 for a 40-gigabyte version, $599.00 for the 60-gigabyte version. So it is not too cheap, but it is a pretty cool player. It's got an all-metal construction with a five-inch touch screen on the front. Screen quality is really nice. So as a portable video player, the Q5W supports a resolution of 800 by 480. And almost any video file we threw at this thing didn't require any conversion prior to putting it on the device. For an extra $200.00, you can get a optional GPS cradle that will turn the Q5W into a GPS navigation system for your car. The actual GPS functionality is not so bad. Actually, we gave the to Bonnie Cha, our GPS editor here. She gave it a test drive, and she said the maps rendered really well. The wide screen display was really beautiful. The downside to using the Q5W as a GPS device is that the menu system is little bit complicated to operate. And it's also a bit heavy. One of the more frustrating parts of the Q5W is the fact that, even though it's a touch screen device, you really can't operate it with your fingers. You have to use this little included stylus pen to be able to click on any of the tiny little icons and the tiny little keyboard. So another frustrating part of the interface is that there's really two interfaces going on here. There's a Cowon application, a browser that launches when you boot up the device. But there's several times when it kicks you into the root browser, which is really an embedded version of Windows CE5. Aside from the interface issues, Cowon really did a great job packing in a ton of features in the Q5W. Just, it's too expensive and a little bit too complicated for most average users. But there are going to be plenty of users out there who are really looking for a device that does a lot of stuff. And they're going to be happy with the Q5W. So I'm Donald Bell, and that was a first look at the Cowon Q5W portable video player. ^M00:02:26 [ Music ]