Coby V-Zon Portable Media Player

Coby V-Zon Portable Media Player review: PORTABLE PLAYER ALTERNATIVE

June 2007 By Grant Clauser

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Coby’s PMP4320 V-Zon player is a 20 GB pocket-sized music, movie and picture player and radio. That’s a lot to pack into a portable player, especially one with a 4.3-inch widescreen LCD display. However, it’s not altogether uncommon. The uncommon feature is the ability to record a video source on the fly.

Coby’s recent MP3 and video players have had a fashion upgrade of sorts—this model sports a glossy black front reminiscent of a Sony PSP with a white back panel. There are only three buttons on the front plus a four-way joystick that also functions as an enter button. On the side, under a little rubber cover, is the USB jack plus an A/V input and output jack.

Media compatibility is also one of the Coby’s strong points. On the music side it supports only MP3 and WMA, but for video it will digest MP4, AVI, ASF, XviD, and Windows Media 9 (WMV and ASF). In the picture department you get JPEG, GIF and BMP.

Getting files onto the Coby is easy, but some people would appreciate a little more organization and hand-holding. Simply connect it to a USB port on a Windows or Mac machine, and drag and drop your media files into the appropriate folder (music, photo, video, ebook). If you want to make customized play lists or organize the music or videos by genre, you’ll have to create your own subfolders on the system. You can do this either with your PC when the V-Zon is connected or you can create folders on the fly with the unit.

Navigating around your files on the Z-Von isn’t complicated once you get accustomed to the system. The main menu displays icons for all the media categories plus system controls. Select one and you’re presented with folders containing your content. If you named and organized everything first, finding what you want isn’t difficult. If you didn’t then you’ll just get a long list of file names. When navigating your music collection you can’t opt to search by artist, track or genre the way other players allow. Instead, you just browse the album folders the way you would in a Windows Explorer window. It’s not that it’s difficult, but it doesn’t give you that thrill of coolness that comes with a Zune or iPod.