Cowon Q5W

Hi I'm Nate Lanxon and today we're going to look at how the South Koreans intend to fight the French. No, there'll be no swords. Instead, there'll be this: the Cowon Q5. It's the Koreans' answer to the Archos 605 WiFi -- a French media player we've shown a lot of love for in our past. The Q5 though, is an absolute monster of a PMP. It's made out of a black metal, with the massive five inch touchscreen to compliment it. You're probably thinking, "Sure, it looks like Rambo. But can I use it to beat whales to death?" Well I'm pleased to say yes, yes you can. It's absolutely solid, from it's metal enclosure, to its weighty interior and hard disk drive, it's a player that, when not being used to watch high quality video or incapacitate sea-bound mammals, will survive the knocks and bumps of life on-the-go. Specs-wise it's extremely impressive. Like its baby brother the Cowon D2, it supports an amazing number of codecs, including: Divx, Xvid, ASF, WMV, MPEG-4, OGM, MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV, FLAC, MusePack, APE, JPG, BMP, PNG and RAW. But there's no support for H.264, which is a real shame considering all video can be outputted in full-screen to a TV by component or composite cable. It's built on Windows CE Pro 5.0 and the Windows interface is fully accessible using the touch-screen. This brings it into UMPC territory, though the aging OS is no-where near as capable as the ones running on Vista. It's also a little sluggish to use and although built-in WiFi is handy, using it to browse the Web isn't pleasant and the old version of Internet Explorer renders a lot of pages incorrectly. But you can open Microsoft Office documents, so that's gotta count for something, right? The Q5 comes in 40GB and 60GB capacities which is a lot smaller that the Archos 605's 160GB maximum. And, the 40GB will cost you 400 quid. That a lot of quids. But video looks amazing and it sounds terrific. I've been using this for about a month now and I love it, but I just don't think I could pick it over the Archos 605 when it's got a £400 base price. I'm Nate Lanxon and this is the Cowon Q5.