While last week’s iAudio 10 teaser left a lot – or rather, everything – to the imagination, we now get a closer look at the real product.
Design-wise, the i10 borrows the curved back plate of the S9 and some cues from the C2‘s appearance as well. Specs-wise, there are no real surprises to be found in the i9′s successor. As expected, it still uses a touch control interface nobody seems to like, it still has no SD slot unlike most other new Cowon players. On the positive side, this time Cowon was daring enough to release a 32GB model, so the internal storage capacity should be fine for most people’s needs. Contrary to the i9′s 240×320 4:3 screen, the i10 sports a 3″ 240×400 widescreen display (TFT, not AMOLED). While still being a rather slim looking player, the battery life on the i10 seems much improved over the i9 – a theoretical 38 hours for audio and 6.5 hours for video.
The ‘Color Therapy’ user interface is, as expected, just a superficial gimmick. However, it seems – contrary to the C2′s tedious ‘Daily Life’ UI – that the ‘Color Therapy’ stuff might not get in the way of usability and actually lets one tweak the main interface colors to one’s liking.
All the usual features one expects from a Cowon are there as well – BBE sound enhancements, dozens of supported audio codecs, AVI/WMV (and possibly MP4) video support, FM radio, voice recorder, built-in speaker, analog TV-out, line/mic-in, image viewer, text file viewer, and so on. The Korean version also comes with a T-DMB tuner, which won’t be of much use in other countries.
Cowon iAudio 10 product page (in Korean).
