It Rocks!
I gave my laptop to my daughter and use only the netbook. After reading reviews, I'm glad I spent a little more on the Acer. Nuff said!

WOW!!!!
This watch looks 100 times better in person than the pictures that are online. I went to the mall to have links removed and the lowest price I ran across was 1,200.00 dollars. Most places were giving 10 - 20% discounts but, they still did not come close to the 400 or so dollars paid for this one through Amazon. Although, I see now that the price has been jacked up to 900 bucks... Too bad! Still worth it though!

Wonderful sound, but an eccentric interface.
I have been using this device now for a few months, preferring to wait until I'm settled in with it before I wrote a review extolling any virtues or deriding any problems.

I typically use this device while commuting to work (about a 1 hour commute, another hour to get home). Although I haven't done so yet, I would also use this while traveling to a job site.

I work as a senior software engineer for a company that does a lot of work with broadcast media, to give a little background to help you decide if I'm a moron who just can't figure out how to work with any device (let alone this one), or just someone who finds this thing challenging to use.

First, the pros:

The Cowon A3 provides a marvelous sound. I could hear nuances in the music that I missed before when I plugged this into my car's stereo. I believe the device's several pre-defined equalization settings also help tweak the sound without having to be a genius at equalization, while still granting the flexibility to equalize to your exacting specifications if desired. I doubt many players could beat this one for the sound.

I also love that this unit works with ogg vorbis files right out of the box. I don't have to install RockBox or some other 3rd party tool to enable ogg vorbis, my preferred audio encoding.

I enjoyed being able to add lyrics to my songs if I wanted, and have those lyrics play back within the device.

The video screen is very large for this kind of device, providing ample room to watch videos you could store in the thing. I created my own little animation and put it in the device, allowing me to show it to friends without having to create a DvD or force someone to download the animation or whatever.

I also like how you can customize it with your own preferred background images if you like. It comes with some nice samples to use.

Although I have not needed this, it provides interfaces for connecting to an analog television set, or a digital television set. This would be great for storing and showing home videos to family and friends.

It has a pretty good battery life. Once charged, this remains charged for a good while before I need to recharge it again.

It has several nice features built into it... too many to describe in a review like this. And the menu layout for accessing these features makes sense, and isn't overly cumbersome.

And now, some negative press:

The user interface is awkward to use sometimes. It comes with a joy-stick-like control that doubles as a button. You can easily try to move the cursor in some direction, but accidentally press the button at the same time, resulting in a mis-click. This makes working with the device while driving virtually impossible; set up your playlist and everything in advance, and just let it do its thing.

The device's interface also seems buggy. Often, I've tried to interrupt the thing while it's playing to make it do something else, but it either reacts very slowly to such requests, or it just freaks out and loses its tiny little mind. You have to coddle it, waiting very patiently for it to react to whatever you've requested, before attempting to make it do anything else. It is for this reason alone that I haven't rated the Cowon A3 better, as I feel the user interface is a very important part of the overall player. I really want to give this a better rating, for all of it's wonderful features and excellent sound, but I cannot in good conscience do so because of this awful interface. So often, I've had to reset the whole device in a desperate bid to get it to recover.

Its ability to receive FM signals, as described in other reviews here, leaves much to be desired. I live in a metropolitan area (Washington DC area, to be precise), with plenty of strong FM radio signals to receive. This device barely receives any of them, and does so with such poor quality as to be completely useless. While it's an excellent idea to provide the ability to receive FM signals, the inability to actually pick up these signals kind of defeats the purpose. If I could just add an antennae or something... ah well.

As mentioned earlier, I was able to create an animation of my own, and put it in the device. Unfortunately, you have to convert your video to something that seems kind of proprietary in order to make this work. I wish I could just render my video in ogg theora (I mean, after all, if they support ogg vorbix, why not also support ogg theora?), MPEG2 (program stream, although it would be awesome to use transport streams, too), or MPEG4 and be done with it. This is a minor complaint, honestly.

The software that comes with the package feels incomplete. By way of a specific example, I had to search online to find the software that allowed me to embed the lyrics in my music in such a way as to render them within the device. Annoyingly, the CD provides software that leads you to believe you could embed the lyrics using the software, but in fact it doesn't actually seem to work towards this purpose at all. Or, if it does, it somehow manages to defeat my efforts to make it do so.

I also found it very annoying that it doesn't seem to actually draw power from the USB connection. If you anticipate spending a long amount of time with this hooked up to your computer, you'd better use the power cord that came with it, or it'll eventually run out of power. You cannot recharge this device using USB power... you absolutely must use the power cord (which means I now have to bring yet another cord, instead of being able to simply hook this up to a plugged-in-laptop to recharge it, like I can most other devices I own).

The name 'MobileTV' seems misleading to me. This thing is only mobile in that you might record something from a television tuner for replay later. As far as I can tell, you cannot actually view broadcast television from the air without the assistance of a tuner to provide the video.

The video does not support overlaying traditional closed captioning (from line 21 video) as far as I can tell. If you're deaf, this device is useless to you, I believe.

Despite my not-so-great rating, and the many cons I've described, I really do like this device overall. I prefer it over my iPod, because the sound really is that much better, and for the commute, as long as I know what I want to listen to in advance, I can set it up, and let it ride for the full hour I'm on the road. If Cowon could fix the various user interface issues, I'd love to give it at least one more star.