Hasta La Gadget!

Fancy some of the 4K magic from Sony, but are living over in the UK? Well you can get one step closer by pre-ordering today. The Bravia X9 — as it’s known over there — comes in two sizes (55- and 65-inch) both of which will land in bricks and mortar stores in mid-June. The price? Well, £4,000 and £6,000 respectively. That outlay will get you upscaling on all your media, and Sony’s 4K X-Reality PRO enginge handling the full-resolution stuff. Still not convinced? Well there is NFC and plus a TV SlideView app for Android and iOS if that sweetens the deal?

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Sony

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I guess you can more or less say that with the introduction of more and more powerful smartphones arriving in the mass market, the need for a dedicated portable media player has diminished – especially when the visual real estate of such smartphones end up larger than ever before – 4″ and above. Well, if you happen to have a soft spot for a dedicated portable media player, you might be interested to hear that Cowon’s X9 is now available and ready to ship, where it will come in either black or white shades.

The Cowon X9 will measure 72.5mm x 114.9mm and tips the scales at 159 grams, while sporting a 4.3-inch touchscreen display. In terms of storage space, you will be able to choose from 8GB, 16GB or 32GB of internal flash memory, which can be further augmented thanks to the inclusion of a microSD memory card slot. Cowon touts that their X9 is capable of delivering up to 110 hours of continuous music playback, which is definitely a boon to any long distance traveler, not to mention up to 13 hours of video playback. In order to juice it up, it takes just 4.5 hours over an AC adapter, although you can take the USB route which requires half a dozen hours instead. Depending on the capacity, price starts from $229.99 onwards.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Could the Cowon X9 be a super portable media player?, Cowon unveils Z2 Plenue portable media player,

Well, the Cowon X9 is said to upgrade itself from the Cowon X7 which was released last year, where it will feature built-in flash memory to get you started right out of the box without the need for a hard drive. After all, hard drives do come with moving parts inside, so if it were to go through bumps and knocks while traveling, there is always a chance of the hard drive needle crashing and causing all your data inside to go belly up. Bluetooth connectivity is not part of the deal, but you do get a microSD memory card, with up to 32GB of storage space, a relatively poor screen resolution of 480 × 272 pixels in this day and age with a 4.3″ screen size.

Other tactile buttons include Fast Forward, Rewind, and Skip, making the X9 a far superior portable media player compared to its predecessor, the X7, where that model came with a unified menu/play/pause and a pair of volume buttons. Cowon touts a battery life of up to 110 hours for audio and 13 hours for video, where a proprietary USB connector is also thrown into the mix. I would say the Cowon X9 does not have much of a future in this day and age.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Cowon Z2 media player hits the FCC, Cowon D3 finally receives Android 2.3 Gingerbread update,