Home > Consumer Reviews > Cowon U3-4096BL iAudio U3 4GB MP3 Player with FM (Black)

This Cowon player is very compact and easy to use. The sound it produces is the best I ever heard. And I've used Ipod, Creative and heard Iriver's. I use it with a pair of Sennheiser earbudphones. I would recommend this player to anyone looking for a great sounding player.

Looks kinda cheap & unstylish - a bit like a cheap black hi-fi system from the late 80s, but the sound quality is very good and it's powerful enough to drive larger headphones. Audio files can be dropped straight onto it without any annoying software. Overall I'm happy with it - but I just can't fall in love with something that looks like a 10 yr old designed it! Curvy black plastic...hmm...

I bought this audio player because I use Linux and I've loaded my music library in the ogg vorbis format, and the players from Cowon happen to support that format out of the box.

I haven't had this player for too long but what I've seen so far is great. The audio playback quality is excellent. I can upload songs to it easily from Rhythmbox and it keeps track of things pretty intuitively.

I normally keep it on shuffle for the entire library. I did find it a little difficult to remember how to navigate by folders (so I could just listen to one album) but I probably wouldn't have had such trouble if I had actually read any of the manual on it. That is really my only problem with the player at this point. Definitely worth purchasing.

This mp3 player is awesome. Completely leaves the iPod nano in the dust. It plays music, videos; it even saves regular files if you need to have access from the office to home. I gave my daughter the iPod nano as a gift and she's always having problems, having to upgrade the software, the songs get lost in the software and she has to charge it every night, these problems don't exist with the iAudio. There's no software needed, it's plug and play, and I charge it only once a week. Once I bought it for myself, my husband wanted to one too. Now, we've both had ours for about a year and we're still very happy.

This player sounds great with aftermarket headphones or earbuds. I continually hear previously unrecognized details in my music...

The battery life seems fine, but I haven't used it for more than a couple hours at a time yet. I have charged it via the USB port on my computer. One very small gripe...It doesn't indicate when fully charged using this method. I leave mine in overnight, so I assume it's getting a full charge.

I don't use it for pictures or video.