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Cowon Q5 Adds Connectivity to PMPs

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.

Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
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