Here’s what we know: Not much. The leaked sheet contains no image, no real specs and no launch date. The tablet speculation only arrives once you consider Cowon’s MO, paired with Atom. Yeah, definitely a stretch, but an interesting one to consider on this lazy, post-Halloween Sunday afternoon. [DAP Review via Engadget]

Since we don’t know anything about this keychain-esque DAP, we’re left to guess based on the interesting ad, with its repetition of the “circle + square” tag. Is it a lost-in-translation attempt at our “square peg in a round hole” idiom? A nod to the design of the gadget itself, which is, in fact, a circle combined with a square? A hint at the future aesthetic of Cowon’s players (which have certainly been more attractive lately; compare the blocky utilitarian square of the D2 with the sleek curves of the S9)?

I personally hope it doubles as a USB drive—I really miss the design of the first iPod Shuffle and the Sansa Express, low-profile DAPs with built-in USB. That was so convenient! But we’ll have to wait for a real announcement from Cowon to figure out what’s going on here. [DAPReview]

For now, the device is only listed on Cowon’s Korean site, and there’s no official word regarding when, or if, it’ll be released in the US. alhtough I’d point to English language marketing materials and, more importantly, FCC badging as clues that it eventually will. [Pocketables via Engadget]

The only trouble with that is, as the link to the P5 shows, Cowon has had a few months head start. The P5 also has a bigger screen (SmartQ 5 checks in at 4.3 inches—why not 5?), although the two devices share the same 800×480 resolution. Both devices also come standard with wifi, Bluetooth, GPS via USB and all the other little PMP features we expect today, like touchscreens. Oh, the exception is 3G, which is unavailable on both devices. Boo.

So what’s the big differentiators here? Well, there’s only one we can seen, and it relates to price. PMPtoday speculates the SmartQ 5 will surprise PMP fans with its comparatively lower price point. Is that enough? [zol via PMPToday]

This review has been over a month in the making. Let me explain. While the S9 comes packaged with proprietary PC-only iTunesish software, I planned to mount the S9 like a USB drive and drag and drop my music and videos. While a firmware update and the actual file transfers seemed to go fine, when I started opening folders within the S9 itself (yes, you have to deal with folders), I’d get endless lists of gibberish, often followed by a system freeze that only a hard reset would fix.

I dealt with tech support (who of course had never seen the problem), and it was finally determined that I should get a new one. I was shipped another unit and the same thing happened. I have no doubt that somewhere along the line I was doing something wrong (though it’s hard to fathom given the dragging and dropping), but no one could spot it. That’s disconcerting.

I was finally shipped an updated, promised-to-be-working S9, and it really did finally work. It plays XviD and WMV movies, but no generic MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 content (you can forget about h.264). Also, like other players, if the file has too great a resolution, it fails—my high definition .wmv of The Dark Knight just wouldn’t play, nor would a high definition XviD that I tested. Music-wise, the Curve plays MP3, WMA, and a bunch of others, but no DRM-free AAC. (Again, possibly an MPEG-4 codec issue.)

On the plus side, audio reproduction seemed good and the system is very quick with video media—I could skip around a one-hour, standard def XviD of Mad Men instantly. And I should add, clips really pop off the Curve’s 3.3-inch OLED screen with smooth framerate reproduction.

Recording audio with the integrated microphone worked fine—functional but not stellar—which is to be expected: The mic is but a tiny hole in the case. You can also conveniently one-button record the radio, the quality of which is only limited by the generally decent reception. Plus, after bootlegging the radio, you can drag the created WMA files from the S9 right onto your computer’s hard drive, no questions asked.
Despite many of these functions being excellent, nothing about the UI is as fluid or intuitive as you’d hope to make the experience fun or fulfilling.

For instance, you want to listen to music, so you click the “Music” icon. Easy! But your music isn’t necessarily there. You actually have to follow a green, animated arrow that leads you to a submenu of subfolders. That’s where you actually find your content. Once you’re within these folders, you can actually skip album to album smoothly (just hitting the track forward button), as the system remembers where your content is and even sets up other virtual folders for organising by genre or year (depending on your meta data information). But why did we mess with this green arrow garbage? If you know where my music is, just skip the maze of clicks and take me to it.

The problems are beyond mere organisation. Following the well-designed home screen, the entire OS is driven by icons that are only identifiable by trial and error. It’s frustrating, and I could never just hand this player to one of my parents to use.

And it’s not just that I’m an Apple fanboy. I loved the Clix—remember the Clix? The Clix was great! Its interface made sense and pretty to boot. And other devices from Samsung, SanDisk and Creative have had decent showings in spite of the iPod’s success. It’s just that the S9’s interface is alright-looking, but nowhere as quick and convenient to navigate as you’d hope.

But here’s the thing—to me, the fatal flaw with the S9 wasn’t that strange series of bugs I was able to duplicate on two units, nor was it the confusing directory system. It was that when I held the S9, a pretty decent-looking device, it feels cheap.
It’s too light for its size, almost hollow. In the above shot you can see that the S9 is thicker than an iPhone (and way thicker than an iPod touch). And touching a plastic screen that’s not lightning responsive —there’s a micro delay after each button press—is simply a second rate experience to the iPhone/iTouch super-responsive glass.

At $US240 for 16GB, maybe you thought that the Cowon S9 would be a tempting device to play your Bittorrent collection of movies without conversions. But given limitations with resolutions/format, a disappointing UI and the subpar build, it’s hard to know why the S9 makes a solid alternative to the iPod touch. [Cowon]

For more on the Curve’s iffy GUI, here’s our own John Herrman:

Instead of building out from the user interfaces found in their larger PMPs, Cowon seems to have gone for something fresh. And by “fresh”, I mean “variously lifted from popular PMP interfaces, including that one that you don’t want to lift from, because everyone will call you on it immediately.”

Like I said, form over function, for $US240. [Amazon — Thanks, Erich!]

Instead of building out from the user interfaces found in their larger PMPs, Cowon seems to have gone for something fresh. And by “fresh”, I mean “variously lifted from popular PMP interfaces, including that one that you don’t want to lift from, because everyone will call you on it immediately.” This is the second day of not-so-great news for teetery player, as yesterday its US release was pushed back to a murky “early 2009.”

A few pictures don’t tell the whole story though—despite the lack of a browser, the Curve still has the potential to give most available PMPs—iPod Touch included—a run for their money. Furthermore, prospective Curve owners should count themselves lucky; early Cowon players didn’t have GUIs. [Digihunter]

Just to let you all know what you’re not going to be getting for Christmas, there’s a 3.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen built into this thing, capable of 16 million colours. A 500 MHz CPU tops off the remainder of the features, as well as T-DMB, Bluetooth and even an electronic dictionary app! Oh, and that’s all on top of a 40-hour charge and an accelerometer too. No price.
[OLED-Info, Thanks Ron!]

It’ll play every file you throw at it: on the audio front, we’ve got (take a deep breath) MP3, WMA, AAC, AC3, FLAC, OGG, Monkey Audio, and a bunch of others I’ve barely heard of. For video, which is the real draw of the O2, we’ve got AVI, WMV, MP4, MKV, H.264, DivX and XviD, and again, way more. It’ll play videos up to 1,280×720 resolution at 30 FPS. What does that dictionary of acronyms mean? No more converting videos. Ever.

The GUI looks a little dated, awfully similar to my aging D2, but very functional all the same. The O2 has Cowon’s vaunted stellar sound quality, but battery life isn’t all that hot: 8 hours of video, which is great, but only 18 hours of audio, which is below average these days. Still, this looks to be right at the top of the heap of portable video players, if only because it’ll actually play your videos without making you transcode first. The Cowon O2 goes on sale tomorrow (the 25th) in black or white, direct from the manufacturer. [CNET]