DigiHunter

Cowon S9 introducing advanced user interface

Dec 8, 2008 13:32

Today, Cowon HQ announced the release date and price of the S9, its last model for 2008. It will be released on December 16 and its capacity will be 4GB/8GB/16GB as a start since the S9 doesn't have a microSD slot to expand the memory size. I'm sure Cowon will increase its capacity once flash prices go down. The T-DMB built-in models will be out later.

I mentioned about the advanced user interface above and I'm sure most of you are curious about this GUI, right? Let's check out the GUI of the Cowon S9.



Cowon has integrated a Zoom UI to its new UI system and it is applied in most areas together with the G-Sensor and preview thumbnails.



The user can adjust pictures, list of songs and text files through the Zoom button and this allows some of the users who have great eyes to have a more expanded view of the list of tracks on the same screen of the S9.

Check out the images below. I think Cowon did a pretty good job since it didn't integrate multi-touch on the S9, like the iPod touch. This way it can solve some of the factors caused by touch devices.



Also, it's a great idea for watching video clips. This integrates a clip preview on the GUI system, too. The iPod touch shows a thumbnail of each clip to find the movie clip more quickly. Cowon shows each clip preview in many thumbnails in a few seconds. Even if you forget to bookmark where you watched your video, you can now easily track back with the Video Clip Preview which the Cowon S9 is introducing.







Another new type of GUI is the Quick List. While in music and movie mode, the user must leave the page to check on previous or next track information. Cowon has built in a Quick List in each corner of the music and movie mode so that at one touch, you can bring up thumbnail images to check what is in the previous and next track for each mode you are in. What a clever idea, isn't it?

 

The G-Sensor will act like below. During music mode, the S9 will show the album cover list when in landscape orientation, and and during movie mode it will show the EQ and other related action menus when it's positioned vertically. 



Everything seems great and nice when you see those images with all the album arts included. Now, the negative thing I would like to point out is that Cowon is currently not providing any application for those album arts. What I mean is iriver bundles its iriver player plus software to help users get those album images instantly together with all the tag information.

Currently, Cowon provides JetAudio as its bundled application, but this requires gathering all the related tags and album arts by the user himself, which is very inefficient. Apple achieved great success with its interface because it provide all the fixed content via iTunes so users don't have any trouble inserting any content. iTunes converts movies, pictures and is able to modify and fix all the tag information online quickly and in a straightforward manner.



I hope Cowon can improve its software application just like it did with in the S9.

The Cowon S9 price is 219,000 won for 4GB, 259,000 won for 8GB, and 309,000 won for 16GB.



The GUI action can be found at the link here.

More information can be found at Cowon Web site or directly here.

Recent Comments

 

Most Discussed

 

Browse Archive