Cowon drops MP3 player prices for the holidays
Cheaper than SanDisk? Could it be?
(Credit: Cowon)No sooner had I posted an announcement about Iriver's holiday price drops than fellow Korean DAP manufacturer Cowon hit us with some news about some enticing pricing of its own. The company is lowering the MSRPs for all models currently marketed in the U.S., with the exception of the newly-released O2. For the rest, you can expect to see a drop of between $20 (for the smaller, flash-based players) all the way up to $70 for the 80GB Q5W.
You can find a complete list of the new prices below, but I wanted to give special attention to one player: the Cowon U5. The player was never pushed much in the U.S. market--in fact, Cowon declined to send us a test unit for this reason--but you can currently find the 8GB model for under $90 on Amazon. For those who are counting, that's $11 per gigabyte, making it the cheapest flash player by a reputable manufacturer--yep, it's even cheaper than SanDisk's Sansa Fuze.
It's no puppy, but that doesn't mean it can't beg to be taken home for the holidays.
(Credit: CNET/Corinne Schulze)New MSRPs for Cowon MP3 players and PVPs:
- iAUDIO F2 4GB: $79.99
- COWON D2 4GB: $139.99
- COWON D2 8GB : $159.99
- COWON D2 16GB: $199.99
- iAUDIO 7 4GB: $99.99
- iAUDIO 7 8GB: $119.99
- iAUDIO 7 16GB: $159.99
- COWON Q5 40GB: $439.99
- COWON Q5 60GB: $469.99
- COWON Q5 60GB with GPS Cradle: $589.99
- COWON Q5 80GB: $499.99
- COWON A3 30GB: $299.99
- COWON A3 60GB: $319.99
- COWON A3 80GB: $349.99
- COWON U5 8GB: $109.99
For more than five years, Jasmine France has covered a variety of tech products for CNET--from scanners to keyboards to GPS devices--but she's happiest where she is now: sitting atop a pile of MP3 players, "testing" every music service known to man, and jamming a variety of earbuds in every shape and color into her absurdly small ears. E-mail Jasmine. 
