iAudio X5 60 GB Multimedia Player

Have you heard about COWON JetAudio before? May be, but not me. I spent about six month researching different players before I came across this player on Amazon.com. After reading all these exciting reviews and being backed by the Amazon 30 day satisfaction guarantee I decided to pull the trigger. My main criteria for it was the sound quality and capacity. I could care less about it's photo and video abilities. As I start listen to it sound quality totally exceeded my expectations after all those disappointing in store tests for... well let's not name the names.
A hefty 60 gig should satisfy my needs for long time to go. This unit has a bright 160 x 128-pixel, 1.8" TFT LCD screen and you can set a custom wall paper on it. It displays all necessary info about your file such as bit rate, EQ setting, volume, play mode, file format, sound settings and more.

Let me start from highlights:

1. Great, great sound quality, with or without all those sound enhancement features such as bass compensation, MP3 enhancement, surround sound and more.
2. AM/FM radio listen/record, voice recording with built in mike - a big plus.
3. This unit has a USB host mode. It means you can connect multiple USB devices such as digital cameras, card readers, or MP3 players and exchange files without PC! For me it's a huge plus. Being photo enthusiast, now I do not have to buy more flash cards. All I do is connecting my CF reader to this baby and upload files to iAudio's HD, and vola, my card is ready for another set of shots. No need to carry a laptop anymore.
4. Plug and play device. As soon as you plug it in to your PC it sees it as just regular hard drive. Just drag and drop your music, photo, text and etc. files and you done (except video which you want to watch on this player and have to covert it using JetAudio soft). No additional software is needed unlike with other players.
5. Widest range of supporting sound formats from MP3 and WMA to linear (uncompressed, CD-quality) WAV files, Ogg Vorbis files (which yields a better sound quality than MP3 for files of comparable size), as well as FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec, compressed but designed for 1:1 encode/decode).
6. Navigation menu is very intuitive. I barely read the manual. It's amazing how many operations can be done with this tiny joystick.
7. Ability to have five customizable presets for five band equalizer - big factor for me.
8. Different play modes( shuffle/repeat/continuous within all/folder/subfolder)
9. Ability to assign a function short cut to two existing buttons REC and Pause/Play, so you don't have to browse through the menu to get to the equalizer settings or play mode (in my personal case)
10. Ability to create play lists on the fly and plays the ones created on your WinAmp.
11. Virtually unscratchable body and screen unlike others complaining about iPod.

And now time for small turn offs which I can absolutely leave with.

1. Cradle should've been included
2. I'd really prefer to have Input/Output/USB/DC sockets built into the player and not being a part of that cheaply made plastic addendum that can be easily broken or lost.
3. Rubber plug for docking port protection is not attached to the unit. Easy to lose. Why couldn't the do it as with the USB host port.
4. Good quality headphones but odd design. One of the wires is 10" longer than the other to the spot where they bind together. Very annoying
5. While plugged to the PC's USB cannot play files. The only options is charging or HD device.
6. Every time you change settings (volume, EQ set, shuffle FF REW and etc) the screen is lights up that shorten your battery life. Would be nice to have feature to disable such behavior.
7. No carrying case. The leather one that Cowon offers is ugly. Don't buy it.
8. Little thicker (5mm) than the 20/30Gb version, similar to X5L models.

This player does support ID3 tags and displays it on the screen while playing your file. It does not supports ID3 database which is the matter of firmware update, I think, and I could care less about it. Video conversion software does a god and fast job of converting videos.
I really enjoyed watching those videos on its LCD screen. Plays much smoother than you would think for 15fps video files, a big plus. But again video was not my priority.

Overall this is a very compact player packed with lots of unparalleled features that are absent in other players, combined all together in this solid performer. Sound quality and more sound quality. I'm very happy with this purchase. Highly recommend.