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The iAudio gets a bit of an upgrade and is put in the ring against the nano, will the nano retain the crown?

With 4GB capacity and video playback, this should beat the nano hands down. The iAudio does not reply on Flash memory, Cowon has used a tiny, 0.85-inch hard drive to provide four gigs of storage to this video-showing, MP3-playing, nano-assaulting pocket jukebox. Unfortunately, the trade-off is a girth that’s triple that of the nano.

To get videos onto the hard drive you must first convert them with Cowon’s proprietary software. The results are spectacular and an episode of Lost [my standard test movie] looks surprisingly good on the small screen.

Cowon’s players have always sounded great and this is no exception, but navigating your music library is a pain because tracks aren’t categorised by artist, song and album title. Instead you have to find your way through them via a cumbersome file explorer, using up and down arrow buttons that are no match for Apple’s Click Wheel.

Battery life is more impressive. We got around 18 hours of music and six hours of video from a single charge.

Ultimately though, despite providing impressive sound and vision, track navigation stop this being a true contender and I am afraid the nano will retain the crown.

Chris Leckness (3547 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.