Cowon J3 Review (Updated 4/5/11)

[briant1234]

When I got home from work today, I peered out the front door to see my Cowon J3, fresh from Amazon, waiting for me! So now I have decided to post my first impressions and a review with pictures in a few days.
Packaging:
The first thing that caught my eye was the unique packaging. It is shaped like a cone, and apparently is designed to be a flower pot after you are done using it! Well congrats to Cowon for their strange effort toward the “Green” movement. Anyway, the box is one of the best boxes I have ever seen, and is made completely out of plastic. The Cowon J3 is on one side, and the accessories are on the other. In the cap thing there is the manual CD.
Design
The gorgeous J3 is incredibly thin and light, and has lots of tactile buttons. The build quality is quite good, although i personally wish Cowon had put more effort into making supports for things such as the loose battery.
User Interface:
The UI is very responsive, and I love it! I like that it has three different designs, and that you can use UCIs to customize to your liking. I personally like to use the Aero Music UCI. In the "Smart Widget" UI, I think that the widgets could be more useful, such as when you tap the clock, it brings up the clock settings, and when you tap the memory, it should bring up the information screen, etc. In the dynamic square, i found something interesting. For some reason, Cowon decided to add support for 5 pages of icons. I don't know why, as there are no apps or other icons to put there. Maybe Cowon should make more apps?

Sound
Amazing. Simply put, the sound is incredible. I may not be an audiophile, but the sound is just so clear and rich. The Jet-effect 3.0 and BBE+ really enhance the music, and features such as "X-Bass, and Mach3bass" allowed for powerful bass that wasn't overwhelming. If you own any Cowon device, you'll know just how good the sound and sound effects are.

Video and Pictures
The Amoled screen is extremely vibrant and stunning. Videos and pictures look great. The video application is extremely complete, and has many various settings that i haven't all used yet. The photo viewer is also quite good, with auto rotation (via the accelerometer)

Battery Life
The battery is great. Using the J3 on a daily basis, with video and music (for about 2~3hrs a day) the J3 lasted 2 weeks. I set the backlight to 2 though, so your time may vary based on the settings

Other Features
Theres not much to say about the other features. The notepad can draw simple pictures (like paint) the typist records simple notes. The documents can view .txt files. The stopwatch and calculater... are just that. And "Hunter" is a accelerometer based game, where you have to navigate an animal head without hitting rocks or something. The only thing i really find useful is the flash player, which provides access to hundreds of flash games/apps.


Overall, the J3 is simply amazing, and the best player ever!

Photos (more on a seperate post):

[CrowdAds]

[Confispect]

Lmao stay tuned what station

Welcome to the J3 camp.

[briant1234]

I added the rest of the review, and pictures.
Here are some more pics of the sexy J3

[WalkGood]

The "flower pot" is really a pencil holder

[briant1234]

well i assumed that it was a flower pot because of the little card on the bottom that showed a flower

[Confispect]

The J3 is indeed nice it would be ten times better with WiFi.

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by Confispect

The J3 is indeed nice it would be ten times better with WiFi.

Then it would be a D3.

[briant1234]

well a D3 with a fast and responsive interface

[krazzydude]

Originally Posted by Confispect

The J3 is indeed nice it would be ten times better with WiFi.

used to have J3 but I think Itouch with retina display and better multi-touch response is required for satisfactory web viewing.
Not tried D3 so can't comment.
J3 is best for music and radio,IMO, for movies it is second to itouch.
BUT movies sound great on J3 here itouch can't beat it.
Sorry for somewhat OT.

[bascom]

My J3 radio reception wasn't as good as my D2 or iAudio7 so I sold it. The only advantage over my D2 and I7 was the bigger screen which wasn't worth $200 to me.

[Confispect]

Originally Posted by Marvin the Martian

Then it would be a D3.

Now if they would just combine the two....