CoWon Systems iAudio M3

To have a chance of knocking the iPod off its throne as king of the MP3 players you need to produce a smaller device with similar storage capacity. That's just what CoWon Systems has managed with the 20Gb iAudio M3.

In part, its small size has been made possible because there's no display screen on the iAudio itself. Instead this is mounted on the in-line remote on the headphone lead.

This works reasonably well, but be warned that the display is very small and using it is nowhere near as slick as Apple's offering. The biggest failing is that you can't search for songs by name or album. Instead, you have to track down tunes by browsing through the main music folder.

However, the iAudio does score over the iPod in terms of features. It's got a built-in FM radio, it can support WMA and Ogg audio files, there's a good-quality voice recorder and an encoder that allows you to record directly into MP3 format from analogue sources such as a hi-fi. On top of this, the battery life is excellent at 14 hours - that's six hours more play time than Apple's pride and joy.

All in all, this is a very high quality player. It has an abundance of features and sounds great. We just wish it was easier to search for individual tracks. See how the iAudio compares in our hard-disk MP3 player round-up in the next issue of Computeractive.

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