Customer Reviews
Better Than A2 (A Little) 
2008-06-19
The A3 is better than the A2 a little bit. A3 better Screen and Sharper Picture But Not as Bright. Sound the Same as A2 , Video Recording better But Will Not Record DVDs Direct Like A2 it Records Everthing DVD,Bluerays,HDdvds Everthing. Had my A2 for over 2.5 Years No Problem. Great Product With Limits.
OH Yes 
2008-05-15
This is 1-nice player. Best looking LCD i have seen out there. just wish it was a little bigger.
Decent but not sufficient - why I returned it 
2008-02-17
I got this player for long plane trips after much research. I was torn between this and the Archos 605. I went with this one because it supported lots of formats. I ended up returning it, and am waiting for something better to come out.
Here are the problems I had with it, in decreasing order of importance:
1. It says it supports lots of doc formats like word, excel, and pdf. In actuality, the only formats it natively supports is text and csd. it provides software (windows only) to transcode to csd. The kicker is that apparently the software requires that you have installed the program controlling the format to transfer from. E.g., to convert an excel doc, you need to have microsoft excel installed. Ugh. I feel deceived. Further, I wasn't impressed with the csd viewing capabilities.
2. Frustrated, I converted some files to text and tried them out. The player has some bugs where it only display portions of the text file! Somehow they managed to mess up the text viewer on the player so it only displays a small prefix of the text file.
3. On video files I was watching, it has a bug in which the audio is 5 seconds behind the video - wow did that give me a headache.
4. The radio reception on the device sucks, and the auto-record does not support once-a-week recording.
5. The video player has a bug where if you fastforward twice in succession, the player locks up.
6. It was clunky to forward and rewind thru video. You have to go thru a bunch of menus to specify how much to forward and rewind, and it doesn't display images during forward/rewind so it's hard to tell if you've skipped over the spot you wanted to fastforward to.
7. On the plane, with a pair of Sennheiser HD-280 headphones, I found myself wishing the volume control would go louder.
On the plus side, it was easy to connect to Mac and Linux boxes. It just appears as a USB drive, which was nice.
I don't like the Archos player because of the nickle-and-diming of extra features and limited format support. so I think I'm just going to sit out of the market until something more compelling comes along.
Best Portable Video Player! 2008-01-31
I have owned the Archos 605 WiFi which is a great PMP (Portable Multimedia Player). It plays videos, music, can go online and has a touch screen interface, but what it lacks is the amount of formats it supports. It is limited and you are required to purchase plug ins to access more formats and even then it's pretty much limited. Now comes a player that solves this problem and that is the Cowon A3. The A3 can play everything the Archos 605 can plus way more extra formats. It supports MKV which no other player supports (I'm throwing that out since a lot of my videos are in MKV) The screen is huge for viewing videos and the audio can be configured. Battery life is good for video (estimated 7 hours) but audio is not so great (9 hours) though I have a feeling you can get more out of it if you lowered the brightness of the LCD screen and the power saver mode to 10 sec. One key factor is it can play HD resolution (720p only) which no other player can do. Here are my few gripes (hoping that future firmware updates will take care of them, though a few are physical traits and nothing can be done)
1. No native H.264 support (a lot of my video files are in H.264 and this is something that will probably be resolved through a firmware update)
2. No touch screen interface! Using the stick can be annoying at times especially when you want it to go down but you press down on it instead.
3. Fingerprints! The Archos 605 had plastic buttons which did not smudge, whereas the A3 smudges easily.
4. No pouch included.
Even with these inconveniences, the A3 easily surpasses the Archo 605 because of the amount of formats it supports and the battery life is much higher. Also, one important factor, the charge time is much less since the Archos 605 does not include an AC adapter and only USB Charging. Charge time is 5 hours (A3) vs. 10 hours (Archos 605).
Of course I only mentioned the Archos 605 but this player easily bests the following popular players: iTouch/iPods, Creative Zen Vision W, and the iRiver. I highly recommend this for those who are into watching video, though not recommended for listening to music because of the battery life (there are cheaper and better alternative options for just music and iAudio 7 happens to be one of them)
Note: This is not a final rating as I am waiting for firmware updates and the score will change according to those updates.
Update: I still stand by when I said that there is no native H.264 support (though there was a firmware update recently it has not resolved the problems for playing the format) Once this is resolved I will post it up
Update 03/19/08: A new firmware update was just released and it improves on the following: extended music playing hours from 9 to 13 hours, improved avi playing, improved subtitles being displayed (there are a lot more but these are the major improvements that I find noteworthy) What it's still missing is being able to play H.264, specifically with MKV. There are no improvements from the last time as only a very few MKV. files work on the player and even the files that work with the player suffers from bad frame rate. Hopefully the next firmware will fix the biggest problem with this player, MKV. support and improvement with the H.264 One thing to add, I am glad they fixed the avi as it plays much better this time around.
Update 04/17/08: I installed the new firmware, a few things I noticed, H.264 with MKV. still has problems, the frame rate slows down way too much for you to view any videos in this format. Since I don't have any video formats in H.264 other than MKV. I cannot say whether there was any improvement from the last firmware, though I did notice that one of my videos that didn't load at all from the last firmware update was able to load at least this time around (but with terrible frame rate). I hope Cowon America is reading this and making sure the next update will resolve most if not all of the video play back problems that the company is claiming it can play with this player. I did notice that my videos in avi. ran much smoother than before. One last note (to Cowon America): People bought this device to play videos so make that your priority when updating the firmware, the music player comes second since many people did not fork over $300 just to play music.
Update 04/28/08: A new firmware was released on 04/25/08 (again this was an unexpected firmware update seeing how it has only been a week since the last firmware was released). This time around it is supposed to improve H.264, avi, and wmv (I'm not going to mention other updates such as improved music player and more functions added to the player since you can read it on the website). Only reason why I am mentioning the video is simply because there are still too many issues with the player when playing certain formats. This time around I was able to play a MKV. file that was unplayable from the last firmware update, though the frame rate is still not good enough to view the video. I also tested MP4 and found that there are issues with this format as well since I could not get any audio and the video was playing in loops. With AVI I didn't notice anything different from the prior update (my guess is the player has no more issues playing AVI). Another issue with the player is it is supposed to play 720p format but that apparently has not been addressed with this firmware update. I do want to say it is good that Cowon America has been focusing on releasing new firmware updates but I would also like them to know that improving frame rate on MKV, MP4 and playing 720p should be the highest priority for the next firmware update. Playing up to 24 frames per second should be a no-brainer. I will of course update this review once another firmware has been released to the public. For now my score will remain the same since Cowon is focused on releasing more firmwares to alleviate the problems with the player.
Update 06/05/08: New firmware was released back in 05/19/08; I only recently downloaded this and because of a lot things happening, could not update my review as soon as I downloaded it. As expected, better avi. playback and for the first time, 720p is playable, though only in MP4 format and the frame rate suffers as the audio and visual are not in sync. MKV. seems to be the biggest issue here, as the frame rate is terrible causing many videos in this format not showing on the screen at all. So far, I have not encountered any audio problems, as it's very clear. My advice to Cowon America, fix up the video issues for the next firmware update! 720p running in every format, and not just MP4 (with very good frame rates). Making sure MKV. works is another priority and for crying out loud, no more updates to avi! Every firmware released was about improving avi, which I'm tired of seeing as the last improvement already made it the best it can possibly be (I don't know what else needs improving for this format). Until next time (or firmware update to be exact).
