This article is more than 1 year old
Cowon iAudio X7 hard drive PMP
Media player, meet external HDD
Solid audio
External controls are limited to two chrome volume buttons on the left, an on/off/lock switch on the right, and a button marked 'M' below the screen that takes you directly back to the main menu.
Not a classy look, that's for sure
Next to the menu key are two small but surprisingly powerful speakers. At the bottom, you'll find a 3.5mm audio socket, power jack and a port for the 20-pin "Korean" USB cable.
Format support is solid enough on the music side, with MP3, Flac, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, Audible, APE and AAC all catered for, though Cowon makes no mention of AAC compatibility in its literature.
The only video formats the X7 will play are Xvid/DivX and WMV but at least they play reliably. In use, the X7 played every one of over a dozen AVI files I tried even at resolutions up to 704 x 480 and its ability to manage aspect ratios and subtitles was very impressive.