first and foremost, the Cowon S9 is a portable audio player. but it does a lot more than just that.

the sound quality is just superb, beyond anything the competition has to offer. pretty much the same goes for the display (AMOLED is the way to go, beats backlight LCD hands down).

55/11 hours of continuous audio/video playback are figures fro themselves.

the S9 is all about freedom (it certainly doesn't need to be 'jailbreaked' to unleash it's full potential). the S9 is not crippled by DRM and user control. S9 owners are not forced to install any software to manage the content or convert their songs into some proprietary format. it supports most common (lossy and lossless) media formats out of the box.

the only beef i have with the S9 is the proprietary USB connector and the lack of a memory card slot. although 16 GB of storage is plenty, it would be just nice to have because you always need to have the USB cable with you in case you want to add content.