Cowon Q5W

Like a supermodel who's dressed to the nines but can't carry on an intelligent conversation to save her life, Cowon's Q5W will seduce you with its sexy looks but just as quickly disappoint you with a serious lack of substance.

Cowon's baffling new portable media player, available in 40GB or 60GB models, also costs a fortune ($550 to $800, depending on capacity and add ons), requires incredibly high maintenance (no battery recharging via PC), and weighs 13.4 ounces (light for a supermodel, but heavy for a portable media player). Sure, the device's 5 inch touch screen is large and sharp.

It's ideal for watching movies, browsing photos, or surfing the Web all of which the Q5W does, but none with grace or speed. Something as seemingly simple as finding the music menu is a challenge. Sadly, even the excellent EQ, FM radio, voice recorder, and the included games can't save this glamorous mess.

At close to a pound and measuring 3.5 by 5.5 by 0.8 inches (HWD), the Q5W is positively bulky, and far from pocket friendly. Cowon put two USB connections (one standard, one mini) on the device for loading media, as well as a built in speaker and a microphone.

An I/O port on the bottom panel connects to an A/V out cable (included, but, oddly, not the cable pictured in the manual). There's also a remote that controls many of the device's functions. These inclusions are thoughtful, but the real meat is in the player itself, and boy, is it a pain to use.

Part of the problem here is that, though it's marketed as a personal media player, the Q5W is also trying to be a PDA, and even a GPS device, all at the same time. And this approach isn't very successful.

When I saw that the device runs Windows CE 5.0 essentially a stripped down version of Windows Mobile for phones. It tracked down Sascha Segan, our lead analyst for cell phones and PDAs, and asked him to spend some time playing with the Q5W. His thoughts?

"Cowon probably used Windows CE for ease of development, not ease of use," he said. "Windows CE has a lot of off the shelf components available for developers, so by using this standardized OS, Cowon could bring a flexible media player to market more quickly and cheaply. But Cowon wasn't intending to make it a fully fledged PDA just to leverage the Windows CE marketplace for its own development advantage."