Cowan Bringing S9 Media Player to U.S.

Cowan is bringing its sleek S9 touchscreen media player to the United States (barely) in time for the holiday season.

Cowan America has announced that it plans to begin offering the the sleek Sowan S9 media player to the United States, with online sales slated to start December 19. The S9 has attracted attention as a potential serious competitor to Apple’s iPod touch: even though it doesn’t pack Wi-Fi or access to an App Store with oodles of third party applications, as a pure media player it offers great specs…and a great screen.

The Cowan S9 packs a 16 million-color, 3.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen in a 480 by 272-pixel widescreen format, along with a 500 MHz processor, Bluetooth 2.0, an FM receiver (with recording capability), integrated microphone, USB connectivity, and a 3.5mm headphone output. On the media side, the S9 offers wide-ranging video (MPEG 4, AVI, and WMV), audio (MP3, FLAC, Ogg, WMA), and image (PNG, JPG, GIF) support, and promises up to 11 hours of video-playing battery life (55 hours audio-only). Plus the unit is the first from Cowan to offer BBE+ sound processing, to offer sound effects, EQ filtering, and stereo enhancement.

The Cowan S9 will be available in 8 GB and 16 GB configurations for suggested prices of $199.99 and $239.99, respectively.