Cowon iAudio 6 (4GB)

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By Edvarcl Heng
May 30, 2006

You have to hand it to those Korean folks; they are surely as geeky as they come. While Apple was busy gobbling up Samsung's flash memory modules as fast as the latter could make them, Cowon chose to go the hard drive route for its latest mini player.

Design
At 76.1 x 35.6 x 19mm, this certainly isn't iPod nano anorexic, but the skinny here is that the iAudio 6 sports a 0.85-inch hard drive which should hold plenty of geek chic. World's smallest hard drive in your pocket? It may not be the snazziest pickup line in the world, but hey, somewhere out there, a gadget chick may just find it cute.

For all its compact size, the iAudio 6's 60g heft is certainly solid. The black metallic backing lends it a bit of style and the tactile buttons are responsive. Besides the physical buttons, the iAudio 6 also includes touchpad-style navigation as well--a diagonally-placed touch strip which sits right beneath the OLED screen. It's imaginatively called the Swing Touch and, while the elongated groove is undoubtedly more comfortable than a conventional touch strip, we did not exactly felt that the slanted strip offered any added benefits.

We also experienced a few hits and misses with the Swing Touch; it can be overtly sensitive sometimes and on long video clips we had to resort to holding down the skip button segment on the strip rather than rowing it through the video. Even then it could not fast forward swiftly enough.

The 1.3-inch screen struck us as a little too small: Watching clips with subtitles was an exercise in eyesight wear-and-tear. Like a lot of Korean MP3 players we've seen recently, the user interface often includes both graphical user interfaces (GUI) as well as the more geeky root directory.

The Menu button toggles between the GUI, the root directory and currently playing content; and like most devices that sport both UIs, the GUI is often only a front. It does not support ID3 tag browsing. Instead, click on the Music option in the GUI menu and the root directory will be launched. If you are the sort who loves to keep things neatly sorted out in folders, the iAudio 6's file management system will suit you to a tee.

We like that the colorful display on the iAudio 6. ID3 tag information is stacked neatly with cute little icons on the side. The display also squeezes in quite a bit of track information without making things look too cramped.

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