Cowon's S9 is an iPod Touch-beater. Sort of...

Tuesday 03 March

The Cowon S9 boasts superb sound quality.

This week I’ve been playing with one of the many pretenders to the iPod Touch’s portable music player crown – the Cowon S9 8GB. And by and large I’ve been very impressed, particularly when it comes to audio quality.

Plug in a decent pair of headphones and you’ll be staggered by the S9’s beautifully detailed soundstage – it’s certainly a couple of notches above the iPod’s sonic capabilities.

Another strength is its support for a huge range of file formats (including Ogg and the ultra-high quality FLAC lossless codec), not to mention a fantastic AMOLED screen and the ability to play hugely popular DivX videos – the iPod is much fussier about what it will play back.

That said, the S9 still can’t offer the all-round slick user experience of the iPod Touch. There’s no Wi-Fi, no web browsing and the touchscreen capabilities pale in comparison.

If Cowon can step up to match these in the future, then it might have a real iPod-killer on its hands. Of course, then there’s the whole question of competing with Apple’s multi-million dollar marketing campaigns – a slightly tougher prospect, methinks…

Take a look at the latest Web TV episode for a more in-depth first look at the S9.