Cowon Q5 Adds Connectivity to PMPs

Cowon's forthcoming Q5 personal media player touts a 5-inch screen and offers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and HSDPA wireless connectivity...for a price.

Cowon has officially announced the Cowon Q5 portable media player, which truly aims to do it all: offer music and video playback capabilities, act as a Windows palmtop computer, tap into Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even HSDPA wireless networking, and even add on optional GPS capabilities.

The Cowon Q5 will sport a large 5-inch, 800 by 480-pixel, 16-million color LCD touch screen display; the unit runs Windows CE 5 Professional on an AMD Alchemy au1200 processor running at 500MHz. On the audio front, the Q5 handles MP3, WMA, wAV, AC3, AAC, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis files; on the video side, it can play back AVI, ASK, MV, MPEG, and MP4 video, along with DivX and XviD. On the connectivity side the Q5 offers Wi-Fi (presumably 802.11b/g, but there’s no definitive word), Bluetooth, and even an HSDPA modem so users can connect to the Internet using their high-speed mobile data plan. The Q5 will also offer an optional GPS package with TeleAtlas maps of the United States, 11 million points of interest, and text-to-speech functionality for hands-free direction-following. If that weren’t enough, the Q5 includes an FM receiver and integrated speakers, a photo and document viewer, plus voice-recording functionality (using a line-in jack). Cown says the unit will get up to 13 hours of battery like playing audio, and play up to 7 hours of video on a single charge.

Cowon says the Q5 will be available in two configurations—40 GB and 60 GB—at estimated U.S. prices of $499.99 and $549.99 by the end of the second quarter of 2007. Cowon will likely offer the Q5 in Asian markets, but no timetable or pricing has been released.