Love my D2.
Pros:
-Awesome audio format support - Cowon is one of the best companies when it comes to supporting diverse formats, ogg and flac are supported out of the box on the D2...
-SDHC support is amazing. I currently use
16GB class 6 cards for expansion in my 4GB player. So for ~$30 you can expand your player's library capacity by 16GB whereas other companies (such as Apple) charge a ~$100 premium just for an 8GB upgrade (16GB total) over an 8GB model
-Sound quality is definitely amongst the best when it comes to portable players
-Battery life is awesome, they claim ~40hours for music and ~10 hours for video, and my results wouldn't refute such claims. There's a wall outlet charger included and a standard mini USB cable as well, either can charge the unit.
-I was actually pretty impressed with the touch interface, I wouldn't exactly call it clunky as it is actually amazingly precise with how sensitive it is in being able to shuffle to different parts of a track or video on such a tiny track bar. If anything the downside is that the smallish screen makes it hard to do some of the finer precision inputs without the included stylus thingy, however general navigation is easy even with fingers.
-Mass storage drag and drop interface, no need for BS proprietary software just to upload your files.
-Surprisingly small/compact, very solidly built
-cool extras such as ability to browse pics (although it can be pretty slow with larger pics), basic text files, FM radio, record from its built in mic (or from FM stations), a notepad you can actually draw on, Flash player (which I actually have never even really tested yet, but now that I've thought about it for this post I think I'll go mess around with it), basic function calculator and scientific calculator.
Cons:
-Transfer rates directly to the built in memory or even to the SD memory through the player is very slow on my 4GB model (maybe the newer/larger 8GB/16GB models are faster?). Tops out at an abysmal ~4MB/sec write speed, however I get around this by filling up that memory with some of my absolute favorite media and then just never changing it. Transfer rates to a
16GB class 6 card with a decent card reader are
much better ~12MB/sec write speed, plenty fast for throwing around a decent amount/size files - fill it up with the reader, plug it into the D2 (every time the reader detects a possible change in the memory - ie you add/subtract something or swap cards - it'll rescan it, which can take a minute or so, but it isn't that bad at all). Of course if you end up operating with several expansion cards (or only need 1), you may never really have to mess with reorganizing files aside from adding new ones.
-file limit, I think its like 4000, so if you think you can go for a 16GB model and then throw in a 32GB SDHC card for a 48MB effective player, you'll probably want to make sure a lot of your music is very high bit rate and/or have a lot of video files on there as well. However this "con" isn't so bad as you can always get around it by filling up the internal memory and noting how many files you have on that, and then just swapping flash cards if your library really is well over 4000.
-video support requires proprietary software to covert files. The good news is that this con isn't really that bad in the fact that the software is excellent in recognizing different formats and is able to convert just about anything to the proper format. The conversion also helps improve video playback battery life so that also helps offset the negativity of this con, however it is still a con as it isn't as awesome as just dragging and dropping the files into the player like you can do with the audio files.
-touch screen makes blind music navigation almost impossible, however I don't really mind as I can either select a playlist or folder and then just flip the lock switch and let it go. Of course this is going to be true of just about all touch screens...
-touch screen makes the interface extremely intuitive, however the interface with the file system could be a bit better, IMO you really have to play around with it to learn its ins and outs in how everything works and is organized, which can be a drag if you really expected something you could just pick up and go with. Again, like most of these cons it really isn't that bad of a con, its an aspect that keeps the player from being absolutely perfect.
When all said and done I'd actually probably recommend buying a smaller default capacity D2 and rely on SDHC expansion (granted, don't stop yourself from going with a higher internal capacity if it won't cost more, just keep in mind the absolutely bargain prices SD/SDHC can be had for), as it really is one of the players most badass strengths (it really,
really does make you wonder why more companies haven't implemented support, even makes you wonder why Cowon doesn't have far more products in their lineup that support it). $30 for 16GB of reasonably fast Class 6 (the highest standardized class of SDHC) really does make this player hard to beat.
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