Cowon Systems is a Korean company none for putting out well-designed portable media players. In the United States it distributes through its Cowon America division. One of its newest portable media players to come to American shores is the flash-memory based Cowon O2.
The Cowon O2 is a flash-memory based portable media player, meaning it doesn't offer up an internal hard drive for storage. It also won't store a gigantic music collection either, though the available memory options of 8GB, 16GB or 32GB should still let you store plenty of tunes for almost any road trip you have planned.


If you own a SD or SDHC memory card, you can use that to expand the O2's storage memory via the player's memory card slot.

Screen size on the O2 is 4.3-inches and widescreen to boot, offering 480 x 272 video resolution. It can also output video it displays, up to 720p resolution, via an optional composite cable. It supports a wide array of video file formats, including AVI, WMV, ASF, MP4, MATROSKA (MKV), OGM, MPG/MPEG, DAT and MTV.

The O2 also supports a variety of audio formats, including MP3/2/1, WMA, ASF, AC3, FLAC, OGG, M4A, MATROSKA (MKA), TTA, APE, MPC, WV and WAV. It delivers a number of sound enhancement technologies for listeners, including a 10-band custom equalizer with eight presets, built-in speaker and sound effects.

Battery life of the O2 is said to be eight hours of video playback and 18 hours of audio playback. It can display as well photos of the JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF, BMP and RAW formats as well as letting you view PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML and other file types. Other features of this player, which weighs around seven ounces, include a built-in audio recorder and basic/scientific calculator and notepad.