World's First 0.85" MP3 Player Packs Punch

COWON has finally pulled the wraps off the iAudio 6, and while we can't say we're thrilled with the design we are still somehow drawn to it, possibly, because it's the first MP3 player to use a 0.85" hard drive and the first to use a diagonal touchpad.

Despite the looks, the player holds its own with a 1.3" color OLED display, video playback (they had Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children playing on the display model), picture and text viewing, 20 hours of battery life, an FM recorder and USB-On-The-Go for offloading images from a camera. Audio can also be enhanced with BBE effects.

Supported files include MP3, WMA, OGG, ASF, WAV, FLAC Lossless, MPEG 4 AVI (DivX, XviD), TXT and JPEG. Because the iAudio 6 is PlaysForSure certified, DRM-10 protected songs obtained from sites like Napster are also compatible. That's quite an impressive array of codecs for such a small player.