Cowon Q5W
Portable Player | February 12th, 2008
Wireless LAN, Wireless Internet
Integrated WLAN capability means new possibilies! Entire world is in front of you to be discovered. Just touch the screen and start exloring. Pocket-sized COWON Q5W will assist you throughout your journey. Your exploring experience will only be better with its huge 5-inch 16million color LCD touch screen.
“Jamming a Web browser, Bluetooth, a text editor, and a zillion other features into a PMP is a solid idea, but the interface must be done right. Unfortunately for the Cowon Q5W, running a dated-looking minimally functional version of Windows doesn’t cut it. The 5-inch touchscreen looks great, and the audio is excellent and offers flexible options, but the design (inside and out) is decidedly technophilic. With a few firmware updates, this could be a decent travel companion for the tech-savvy, but it’s too big and heavy to be carried with you everywhere, and the touchscreen interface doesn’t compete with offerings from the likes of Apple and Samsung.”
The top edge of the Cowon Q5W includes conveniently located buttons for controlling volume, a power switch that doubles as a hold button for disabling onscreen controls, two built-in speakers, an infrared sensor for the included remote control, and a pinhole microphone for creating voice recordings. A useful (often necessary) stylus pen for the Q5W’s touch screen is conveniently housed in the top-right edge of the player. Packed into the left edge of the Q5W are jacks for a 3.5mm headphone cable, a 2.5mm headset cable (for voice recording), a power adapter input, a USB-to-PC port, a USB host port, and the oddest feature of all: a fragile, retractable antenna that we first thought was for the FM radio, but is actually used for Wi-Fi reception. The back, bottom, and right edge of the Q5W are bare, save a small proprietary port on the bottom for the player’s AV cable output and optional GPS dock
‘The Q5W powers up in about 20 seconds, booting first into Windows CE and then launching Cowon’s extremely thin interface layer — two icon-filled panes on either side of the screen and several inches (diagonal) of wasted space in the middle. While clearly designed for fingers, the icons should have been made much bigger, and the rest of the menus could use a lesson in finger-friendliness. You can exit Cowon’s interface into Windows CE, but it’s ironic to see such an outdated-looking version of Windows on a device from one of the industry’s most cutting-edge manufacturers. And the OS is pretty sluggish on the 600-MHz Alchemy Au1250 processor and 128MB of RAM.