Cowon S9

The basics

This 8GB PMP has a capacitive 3.3-inch OLED touchscreen, 3.5mm headphone socket, accelerometer, TV Out, FM radio and stereo Bluetooth. It supports MP3, WMA, FLAC, DivX and XviD playback, measures 106x57x13mm and weighs 77g.

The good

Dive into the 480x272-pixel, 16 million colour OLED display and you’ll never want to return to plain old LCD. Colours shimmer with life, action glides effortlessly and shadows have rich, deep blacks. The touch tech is responsive, letting you skim through lists with a flick of a finger. Fire up some high quality audio files and your ears will tremble with pleasure – the S9 cruises effortlessly into the sonic stratosphere, leaving rivals (including the iPod Touch) grounded. You’ll get a transatlantic 11 hours of video playback from a single battery charge.

The bad

The S9 needs to work on its vocabulary. While it’s conversant with vanilla MP3s and WMAs, it can’t speak DRM with Microsoft or any dialect of Apple’s AAC. Video isn’t much better, with the Cowon unable to understand the latest MPEG-4 or H.264 clips. There’s no web browser on board and no one would prefer Cowon’s fussy and overcomplicated menus to the simple elegance of an iPod Touch interface. Not to mention dire headphones that would look overpriced at Poundland.

The bottom line

You probably can’t afford Sony’s gorgeous OLED telly but this high-class OLED PMP is within almost anyone’s budget. Arguably the best video and audio quality of any media player today, although not the best choice if you’re sitting on a pile of AAC or DRM tunes.