There's actually only one main menu. And it's not the text-based one. Or at least, if the text one is in there, I cannot figure out how to enable it - it's certainly not in the settings.
Which means that yes, I own this device. I imported it a week ago. And I don't know what Darren Murph is smoking, but our impressions of this device are decidedly different.
I'll address the points we disagree on:
UI responsiveness: I would guess Darren didn't actually load any music onto the device, especially none with cover art. The UI is slow. Not unusably slow, but laggy enough to be annoying. And this is largely due to the display of cover art - which you cannot disable (at least, without physically removing the embedded APICS from your media files, which I don't want to do.) I don't even want to disable album art - I just want it to be responsive.
It's also laggy when handling flac - which is sad, as that's the main thing I bought a 160GB player to do.
Button Placement: He's on crack. It's incredibly awkward to hit the physical buttons without two hands. There's a reason the volume rockers/buttons are usually on the top left of pmps/mp3 players. With the buttons at the bottom (especially given the size of this device) you cannot comfortably push them single handed - at least, not without almost dropping it.
Touchscreen responsiveness: This is my single biggest beef. Yes, it's a resistive touchscreen. The resistive touchscreen on my Cowon D2 works perfectly well. This thing? Not so much. Mainly when browsing through the list of music, any given tap has (I'll guesstimate) a 30% chance of not registering. And scrolling itself is woefully inconsistent - sometimes several screens worth of data at a flick, sometimes a single artist. It's maddening.
Other issues: I loaded approximately 90GB of music onto the device, spread out across flac, mp3, and sadly even a few m4a. I loaded it all at once, which was a decided mistake. Cowon's are notorious for being piss-poor at handling large transfers of music successfully - if you do some searching on the web, you'll find tons of forum posts of people complaining about this across various cowon devices. Well, let me report that the X7 is no different - the "Updating Database" took well over an hour to complete, and I was quite afraid that I had bricked the damn thing (since while it is "Updating Database" the device will do nothing else - if you reboot it it will just return to this step from the beginning)
General UI complaints: The Now Playing screen sucks (which Murph did touch on somewhat.) There's no track number or Album title displayed anywhere on the screen. You cannot rotate to landscape. And there is a huge swath of unused screen real estate for no good reason, which to my eye looks quite ugly. Plus the display of album art as background is zoomed in a strange fashion that prevents you ever seeing the full album cover - and if you try, you end up skipping tracks! (you can swipe to skip tracks, and if you attempt to pan the album cover, you do just that, which is annoying since there is no visual indication that this is what happening.)
ALL THAT BEING SAID - I do like the device, because of the superb, unsurpassed sound quality. It blows the doors off of my ipod video with dock adapter, and I would wager to say it even sounds better than my Cowon D2.
So, unless Murph's review unit was running some special-secret-as-yet-unreleased firmware, I cannot replicate any of his experiences with my own unit. But most of my gripes can be addressed in firmware, so here's hoping.
I wonder what made Cowon choose a resistive touch screen. Is the price difference between the capacitive & resistive that large to warrant this?
