IFA 2007: Q5 - Cowon's new luxury-class Portable Video Player

The Q5, a portable media player produced by Korean manufacturer Cowon, possesses a 5-inch touch-sensitive display with 16.7 million colors. Content is displayed at a WVGA resolution of 800 x 400. As its operating system the Q5 uses Windows CE 5.0. An AMD Alchemy AU1200 processor running at 500 MHz supplies the necessary processing power. Its American and Korean versions will also feature GPS.

The feature-packed device plays videos in AVI, ASF, WMV 7/8/9, OGM as well as MPEG4, DivX and XviD formats. It even supports protected content encoded with MS DRM10 or DivX DRM. The portable also sports a component video output for use with an external display. In this case, the maximum resolution is 720p.

In addition to video playback, the Q5 also supports photos and images in the JPEG, BMP, PNG, and RAW formats. An integrated USB-2.0 port with host functionality facilitates copying files to the Q5 from USB devices such as a digital camera or a USB card reader.

Music lovers will also appreciate the portable all-rounder, thanks to its support for MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV, AC3, and FLAC. And as if that still weren’t enough, Cowon even included an FM tuner.

The luxury player weighs in at 380 grams and will be available starting October in two versions, one with a 40 Gigabyte drive for £440 / €650 and another with 60 Gigabytes capacity for £470 / €700. At that price, it seems that the target audience for this device would certainly be the so-called early adopters.