Review: Cowon iAudio 7 portable media player

A feature-packed media player with some new sound processing technology

Cowon is obviously hoping its much touted Jeteffect technology, which offers a range of equalizer effects and sound enhancements to give you Sony-style audio control, will help its appeal.

Indeed, we were fairly impressed by the Jeteffect audio options. If you’re prepared to take the time to experiment, you can achieve some very good results.

Aside from Jeteffect, other features include a photo viewer, video player, text reader, voice recorder and FM radio, which allows you to schedule recordings so you can save programmes to the built-in memory. You’ll also find a line-in port to record directly to the player.

However, none of these features are particularly accessible, at least until you get used to the ‘swing touch’ slider control. Even after extended use, we found the controls too small and it’s not always obvious which you should press to get to where you want to go.

The various options aren’t nearly as accessible as the similar range of effects built into Sony’s range of players, which is partly down to the rather small 1.3in screen. Although it’s not particularly bad quality, it’s too small to enjoy video or photo playback properly and does leave you having to squint closely, even during normal operation. Getting video onto the player isn’t particularly hard though - the software provided will convert files specifically for the player.

Despite the range of features and impressive audio quality, we ultimately felt let down by the iAudio7. Photo and video playback is partly redundant anyway due to the screen size, and although there are smaller capacity models available the 16GB behemoth we had on test will set you back a whopping £235, almost twice the price (if you shop around) of the equivalent sized Sansa View player from Sandisk.