Cowon's New MatchBox Car-Size MP3 Player.

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Author: Kobrin, Mike

No longer a dark horse in the digital audio player space, Cowan continues to pump out solid MP3 players, and the Cowon iAudio F1 ($159.99 direct) is no exception. Considering the interesting design and ample feature set, the price tag isn't too unreasonable for a 1GB flash-based player. Still, it needs some improvements before it tops our list.

The 2.9- by 1.4- by 0.8-inch (HWD), 1.4-ounce F1 resembles a shiny black MatchBox Ferrari-style car. Its analog controls are on top of the trunk and include a four-way rocker with a joystick in the center. The two-color 128-by-64 OLED screen is oriented sideways in the windshield. A little silver license plate on the front says iAudio. Cute. The kicker comes when you turn the player on: The information displays in analog gauges that look like the dashboard of a racing car. A little gas pump indicates battery life.

The F1 is both USB mass-storage-class-compliant and compatible with Windows Media Player. File format support extends to MP3, WMA, ASF, WAV, and OGG, as well as lyric (LDB), though there's no support for lossless codecs, protected WMA, or Audible.

We were satisfied with sound quality on our informal listening tests using the included earbuds. The overall audio was not muffled or murky, though we noted the lack of strong, well-defined bass as well as some softness around the edges of sounds in the middle and high ranges.

You can record FM, line-in, and voice in MP3 format at up to 128 Kbps; voice-activated recording is built in; and an auto-sync feature lets you breakup recorded tracks.

Unfortunately, battery life was a big disappointment. The internal nonremovable rechargeable â€" rated at 22 hours â€" lasted only about 13.5 hours in our testing. We checked all of the settings and reran the test, but we got the same results.

NAVIGATION ON THE F1 can take bit of getting used to.

Overall, we're pretty happy with this player's flexibility and options, but the lack of compatibility with online subscription and download services hurts it somewhat. And the subpar battery life is disturbing. Nonetheless, this is a nice gift for younger music fans-even we had a tough time resisting the urge to drive it around on our desk going "vroom, vroom."

$159.99 direct. Cowon America Inc., www.cowon.com. @@#$$

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By Mike Kobrin