Siu Lun

Here is a mini independent review from me on the Cowon DAB D2 16GB PMP. The reason I brought this is because of my switch to open source formats such as Ogg and Flac. After around 2 days of research on existing portable players that can play Flac and Ogg, I’ve found the Cowon D2 ticked all the boxes plus a bit more!

The Cowon D2 is said to be one of the PMP that is amongst the top in sound quality. It features a lot of arrays of sound adjustment features and indeed, when I started loading up Flac files up on the D2 and listening it on my Sennheise PXC 450.

The sound quality is simply superb for such a small device. Definitely better than my 2nd generation Nano which I’ll be putting it up for sale soon.

Not only is the sound quality good on the D2, with the top of the range model featuring 16GB of space in a tiny device along with external expansion via SDHC cards. It is definitely the most suitable player to get to listening to lossless audio on. Having done a bit of research, I’ve found that this device has already been out in the market for a year.

A new revision is widely expected within this year. Having said that, if I were you I wouldn’t wait for the next revision, as who knows whether Cowon can repeat the success of the D2. As far as I’m concerned, D2 does exactly what I need with no compromise.

Not even on battery life. With up to 52 hours of battery life. Compared to the 14 hours on my iPod.

It’s got to be said however the only disappointing thing is that the DAB feature is a bit of a failure. The reception is not great, in fact, it apparently does not have any antenna and it relies on the audio cable to improve reception. DAB simply will not work well indoors. If you put it in your car, I’m sure it’ll work well. But don’t think that you can listen to DAB in the comfort in your home without being next to the window.

So my advice would be definitely get the D2 if you’re looking for a good player with excellent sound quality that can double up as a media player when you really want it. But save yourself a large portion by not getting the DAB version.

Cowon, nice try to be the first to give DAB on a PMP, but unfortunately without an antenna this feature is really hopeless most of the time.

/Ronald over and out.

Awesome

I’ve been reading various news stories about IE8 on Ajaxian. So I know IE8 is in development, somehow I didn’t quite catched the news that IE8 beta is actually out! until I was looking at some google anayltics stats on browsers today and found some people coming on my sites using IE8…

Well now I’ve installed IE8 on a VM. My first reaction after I’ve installed it, is simply jaw-droppingly-remarkable. I look in horror as all the sites that I’ve made failed under IE8.

Everybody has been touting IE8’s ability to be truely standards compliant. Which adds to an even more deepened sense of depression when I realise the sites I’ve been making – the css techniques and experiences that I’ve gathered in the past 7 years… have failed me.

I admit – I never actually sat down and look through the HTML and CSS specs, that doesn’t mean I’m clueless – in fact, I’ve been pretty good at keeping just 1 stylesheet across all browsers – didn’t even have to use browser specific stylesheets. All these gained through trial and error, experimentations and experience.

So have I really got to go now to read through the standards documents and specs?

Luckily I won’t have to as I can simply tell IE8 to render as IE7.
Here is the official link from MS: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(VS.85).aspx

I won’t get too depressed, until I see the release candidate, as not suprisingly, pretty much every site I’ve come across on the internet doesn’t look correct under IE8. Can we hope that it is simply a matter of time these issues are addressed?

Or is MS’s IE8 plan simply to make it strictly standards compliant and not implement any backwards and additional compatibility that has existed in all previous versions and competitor’s browser just to “please”/”aggrevate” the whiny standards compliancy developer crowd? – If that’s the case – IE8 is a lost cause – which will simply function as IE7 for most sites and the standards compliancy that it has been boosting is simply a comeback at the critics of MS.

Still a new version is better than stalling on IE7, as we developers really need people to upgrade from IE6. The introduction of a newer version would hopefully shift the balance and we can begin to see IE6 being phased out just as IE5.5 has.

Later.