Cowon A3

Hi, I'm Nate Lanxon, and it wasn't long ago that we were looking at Cowon's new media monster, the Q5. But that wasn't all the South Koreans have for us this year, and its other media player will put 720p HD content in your hand and output it to your HDTV. It's the A3 and it looks like this.

It's not even vaguely like the Q5, as it doesn't have a touch-sensitive screen, it doesn't give you access to Windows CE and it won't let you browse the Web. But like I said, it'll play HD videos, record from any video source via composite cable, record via an line-in socket to MP3 or FLAC and it's all captured in real-time on to a 30GB or 60GB hard drive. The choice is up to you, depending on how rich you are.

It also supports an even more extensive list of codecs than the Q5, including: MP3, WMA, FLAC, OGG, Apple Lossless, AAC, AC3, True Audio, Monkey’s Audio, MusePack, WavPack, WAV, AVI, WMV, ASF, MP4, MKV, MPEG, VOB, DAT, DivX, XviD, MPEG-4, aaaand H.264.

The system's actually driven by a dual-core CPU, so it's really quite powerful, and it certainly seems to work faster than the Q5. You need to control it using this weird-feeling navigation nipple, and it's a real pain in the asphalt. It's fiddly, annoying and will make you very cross. But you do sort of get used to it. And you should get six or seven hours of video playback out of a full charge. So really it's kitted out to be a video fan's best friend.

Now this massive screen looks truly stunning. It's got a great resolution of 800x480 pixels and it's extremely bright, crisp and video is really smooth. That fat list of file formats I mentioned earlier will be useless if it sounds like manure being pressed through a blender. Thankfully, it doesn't. Like most of Cowon's past players sound quality is superb. It's loud enough to go deaf from and has a mass of EQ options, including a 10-band equaliser.

The A3 is on sale now and if you're looking for a great alternative to anything by Archos, you definitely need to check this thing out.

I'm Nate Lanxon and this is the Cowon A3.