Cowon S9 photos

The S9 comes beautifully packaged and is even more beautiful to touch. Its 84mm (3.3-inch) AMOLED display is sharp, with 16 million brightly displayed colours, and the capacitive touch screen is responsive, like the iPod touch's.

The S9 scans for scenes in your videos and generates these moving thumbnails to let you easily skip to them. A brilliant feature, well executed.

Yuck--nonstandard USB. We don't like this, and neither should you. Mini-USB all the way, we say.

Here's the main menu: glossy icons, responsive screen.

And this is what you get in the box: rubbish earphones that utterly undermine the player's stunning sound quality, and a USB cable.

Physical volume controls and track-control buttons sit on the top of the player.

Headphones and nonstandard (boo!) USB sockets sit at the bottom of the S9, next to a power-cum-lock switch.

From the side you can see the S9's distinctly curvy form factor...

...and even more so from the back. You'll also find a microphone and a rest button around here. Let joy be unconfined!

Size-wise, it's a little smaller than the iPhone, but not by much.

This photo doesn't quite do the player justice, but its 16:9 form-factor screen looks smashing. Just look at that seal divulge his opinions. Look at him go!

The Cowon S9 (center)offers a slightly larger screen than the Samsung YP-P2 (left), but not quite as large as the iPod Touch (right).