When Cowon released its D3 earlier this year it met with mixed reviews. Criticised for its sluggish performance and poor app support among others, its 'Plenue' re-release under Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) looks to fix some of these issues, offering improved performance and a handful of new tweaks and additions.

Design and build
First up it's a truly impressive looking device - around the size of a modern smartphone, the D3 boasts a 3.7in (800x480) capacitive touchscreen, traditional Android home/back/menu touch controls and an array of buttons around the outside. These include volume, play/pause and track skip, a power button that doubles as a hold switch and a secure port for a microSD card. With a choice of 8GB or 32GB capacities from the off, many users may not need this, but we love having the choice anyway. The headphones port is rather strangely situated at the bottom of the phone alongside mains power, a microphone and proprietary data connector.

Thankfully the main issue with the Android 2.1 device has been addressed - the reponsiveness of the touchscreen is vastly improved over the original, with swipes now recognised instantly and accurately, and even pinch to zoom for photos showing the desired degree of response. A handful of other useful additions include dedicated controls for Bluetooth and Wireless and a few tweaks to the music player, including a sleep timer and improved browsing speed and visual quality of thumbnails.

Android 2.3 Gingerbread
However, in spite of the update, the D3 still runs an extremely stripped down version of Gingerbread - so don't expect to see anything close to what you'd find on a phone. What you  still get is five homescreens on which to place widgets and shortcuts, with a decent amount to choose from covering the main features of the device.

The range of supplied apps is reasonable (for a wireless PMP), with all the essentials covered along with a comic book reader, email application, Twitter app and voice over IP, which can be used to make voice calls when connected to a wireless network. Many of these are very simplistic however, and can be difficult to configure as very little help is giving in setting things up. Replacing them could be an option, but unfortunately Cowon hasn't made this any easier.

While it's possible to install apps onto the D3, the process is still tiresome. Despite having internet connectivity via wireless, there's no direct access to the Android Marketplace. Instead, you'll need to download the APK files individually and drag and drop them into a dedicated folder on the device. When securely unmounted from a computer, you should then be prompted to install the apps found in this folder. Even following this laborious procedure, only around half the apps we tested installed correctly, with many forcing the app manager to close.

This could well be a killer blow for those expecting full Android functionality (which is, after all, heavily influenced by the app store). Worse still, we noticed intermittent crashes that were far too common for our liking. Predominantly, these seemed to centre around connecting and disconnecting a USB cable - which, due to the APK issue we highlighted above, you may find yourself doing quite a bit.

Company: Cowon

Website: http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/

Contact: AdvancedMP3Players on 0131 443 8545

Tags: media player android 2.3 gingerbread cowon mp3 video