For Part – 1 of the review, please click here

The player is really small. Well not as small as the shuffle, but small enough to be carried out on workouts. It is large enough to be noticed and turn a few heads…

Very simple design is what pulled me to the player in the first place. It has a metal ring on top and a 3.5mm jack at the bottom. On on side it has a power button with FwD and PREV buttons and the other side has SHUFFLE/EQ button with VOL+ and VOL-. All functionalities of the player are managed by  these 6 buttons. And the location of the buttons ensure that there is no accidental pressing.

Click Image to enlarge

Operation is simple – press the power button and music starts. press it again and it stops (pauses actually, which means the next time you turn it on, it resumes from where you left it last). Press the FWD or PREV button fast to change tracks. Keep them pressed and release them to forward or advance the current track.

The SHUFFLE/EQ button is a nice thing too. Keep it pressed briefly and it toggles from normal mode to shuffle mode and another such press would do the opposite. Short presses would cycle you through the preset equalizers that are built in. There are 9 modes to choose from and this player boasts of BBE technology being built in. Cool thing is that a voice guides you on the eq setting that you are choosing.

It really is that simple. The built in ear phones are not very good. They are large and not very comfortable to wear. So I suggest you upgrade the earphones to in-ear type to truly appreciate the audio quality of iAudio/Cowon players. BBE enhancements for bass etc are more pronounced with good quality earphones.

One of the gripes with this product which many had pointed out was that there was no ability to skip folders. So if you have 500 songs in the player, you have to go from song to song until you find the one you like. This can be negated if you carefully choose what songs you put in the player in the first place. But this still remained a problem. Remained? Yes, today when I visited the Cowon site, I found that there is a firmware upgrade available for this device which now supports folder skipping. This is an awesome update and I cant wait to get it on my new player.

Even the firmware upgrade is revolutionary. No need to install any application on your device. You just have to copy the firmware onto the device and remove the earphone. The device updates itself automatically. How cool can things get !

I am still hunting for an arm band for this player to help me better manage the cable mess. But even without it, it is simply great.

File transfer and charging is though a supplied USB – custom 3.5mm jack. USB seems to be high speed which means you dont wait for a long time to transfer the files onto the player. Only concern is that since the cable is non standard, you can pretty much box your player if you loose/damage the cable. So keep it very carefully.

If you need more information, leave your comments below. I will try and post some pictures later..

Here are the tech specs for the player:

Sound Enhancements: BBE, BBE ViVa, BBE ViVa 2, BBE Mach3Bass, BBE MP, BBE Headphone 1, BBE Headphone 2, and BBE Headphone 3

Data Transfer: MSC via 4-pole to USB cable

Battery Life: 11 Hrs. (charge time 1.5 hrs)

Audio Support: MP3, WMA, FLAC, OGG, Wav

Weight : 16.6 grams

I am a tech enthusiast. Having moved to a new job in Mumbai, meant that I had to plan my fitness regime. I started the daily walk/jog routine and I think we all know how boring this can be! Hence I started listening to music to enjoy what I was doing – even more. I started using my Zune 30 which needs no introduction.

It is a first generation MP3 player from Microsoft which is very bulky and not suitable for jogging. (fine for brisk walking though)..Later I switched to my Nokia E63, which is no audiophile device.

The built in equalizers don’t work for god sake…The phone was lighter than the zune but still was bulky to carry for a jog. Then I borrowed my friend’s iPod Nano which even had a arm band for the fitness freaks.

Nano however didnt please me because its controls were very messy. The famous apple click wheel is not the best of options while you are walking jogging. With these three trials in mind, I decided to go for a new MP3 player – which really was an excuse to buy a new gadget! The same way, buying the E63 was an excuse when I had a decent phone already! But hey, the E63 did give me a lot of functionality which I really dig. But more about that in a separate article.

Coming back to the MP3 players, I visited two stores to see the options. eZone and Tata Croma.

They all had a plethora of devices ranging from simple players to advance PMP like the iPod touch and the like. My intentions were clear from the beginning. I needed something small, minimalistic and having display was really not necessary. I had three options in front of me.

a) Sony Walkman with a USB connector built in.

b) iPod shuffle

c) A seemingly unknown player which had plain looks – the iAUDIO E2 player (which was only available in Tata Croma)

In the first couple of visits I ignored item #3 because it really was not appealing. I even forgot the brand name and googled for “iriver player” only not to find any player which I saw in the store.

As with many things in life, I decided to eliminate options to narrow down on my selection. The survival of the fittest kind of principle. I eliminated the Sony because it was long and seemingly bulky. But its weight was really not an issue. Its just that the form factor seemed dated and I really didn’t find it appealing to start with.

I really liked the looks of iPod shuffle. The clip was a practical feature in the player and could have been the perfect companion for me during my workouts. But it so happens that the player really has no buttons on it. Yeah, you read it correct. Instead apple has moved all  the controls on the earphone. This means two things.

1) You have to grope for the earphone cable and press the right button without even knowing which is which….

2) (this is my biggest gripe) – you cannot use your standard earphones with the nano !!

So this was out of the picture as well.

That left the iAUDIO E2 player in the race. I wasn’t very convinced about the player. The sound quality, the order in which it played the songs and many such questions remained unanswered.

My friend and I tested the player with a set of creative earphones and the sound quality seemed pretty decent. When we asked the sales person about the order in which the songs are played, he remarked that it only plays them in a shuffled mode! This was a deal breaker because I wanted flexibility in what I listed to. I am not a big fan of randomness. I guess no one except mathematics is.

So we did a last minute product review online (thanks to the E63) and found that the playback can be customized to be either random or regular at a touch of a button. This is all I needed to hear. I picked up a black E2 player with a capacity of 4GB.

2GB price = 2499/-
4GB price = 2999/-

More detailed review in Part  – 2..Stay tuned.

This is a short but interesting post.

Image courtesy : designspongeonline.com

It is also based on a real life experience. My grandfather listens to a dozen of slokas and devotional songs everyday. He has a routine which he follows. The tracks that he listens to are:

1. Sri Venkatesa Suprabhatam
2. Shri Hanuman Chalisaa (the whole album)
3. Lalitha Sahasranamam
4. Aaditya Hrudayam
5. Vishnu Sahasranamam (evenings)

The same songs are played everyday in the same order. So far he was using cassettes and a Philips tape recorder/player. The problem with this setup is that the tapes get worn out soon due to repeated usage and also get weak. So once in two weeks or so, one tape of another would snap. I would have to open them up and stick the ends with cello tape and put the tape back together. Occasionally the tape would get wound up inside the player due to some error.

And then we have speed playback issues, constant rewinding/fast forwarding and ofcourse, changing tapes problem.

So I decided to simplify the issue for him. I had an old unused MP3 player lying around. It had a defective ear phone socket. With some local supplies I managed to change the socket and replaced it with an external one. Then I copied the MP3 tracks for these songs onto the MP3 player. We had a spare set of speakers lying around. I connected these to the player and viola! – We had a digital system with all these songs stored in the order in which it would be required to play back.

All my grandfather has to do is press the play/pause button and change the single AAA battery once in week or so. I could have simplified it further by hooking up a power supply to the MP3 player, but perhaps I save it for another day.

I will try and post some pictures of the same soon. In case you want more details, leave your comments behind.