Thread: HDD-player Cowon iAudio 6

During last two decades almost all industries, especially electronics, have been greatly stimulated by aspiration for miniaturization of all devices. Practically all those devices which used to be brick-esque in looks and weight, now easily disappear in a briefcase or a bag. Of course, having created a compact casing it is impossible to downsize a handset, notebook or audio player outright.



This process has a reverse side, the device’s size remains unchanged due to the already shaped up form-factor but other parameters are growing. It is easily demonstrated by the example of hard drives: there is a couple of common form-factors, i.e. cliches for casing form and dimensions. See for yourself: in 1996 a conventional 850 Mb PC hard drive went for 300 USD. Ten years later, a drive of the same size contains several hundreds of gigabytes, while the price is cut in half.

he Cowon iAudio 6’s casing bears much resemblance to conventional battery-powered flash-players which were sought-after a few years ago. This form-factor is called candy-bar due to its visual similarity to a chocolate bar such as “Mars”. In spite of the absence of any novelties in the design the player looks quite nice, mostly due to the balance between the size and shape of the elements this effect goes through other Cowon’s models ( (but not in all of them). Personally, for me, the benchmark of a candy-bar has been model U3 released a couple of years ago.