On December 15th, Korean manufacturer Cowon released its well-anticipated (and twice delayed) flagship Portable Media Player upon the UK high street. After pre-ordering my own Cowon S9, reviews started to trickle in (through the wild conjecture and white noise of impassioned zealotry; that which generally accompanies the discourse of any one of Apple's competitors) that were painting a resounding picture of mediocrity regarding its rather flimsy, rather botched, user interface.
The S9 user interface falls short on several fronts, not least its general usability and intuitiveness. The cover-flow implementation is a let-down to say the least (or to be more accurate, it’s completely useless), and the media-library navigation is merely adequate and otherwise completely lacking in innovation. Considering the S9s hardware specifications, it’s unsurprising that most people were expecting it to accommodate an interface more along the lines of unparalleled beauty, rather than mere mediocrity.
Fortunately, as the user interface is implemented entirely in Flash, it’s quite easy for Cowon to accommodate the homebrew niche by distributing the UI. As it has done for other PMPs in in the past, Cowon released a sub-section of the flash UI here and here. The first is the Main menu, and the second is the ‘now playing’ interface for music media. On inspection it seems the latter is either a development version (with debug panes) or an older prototype. Together, this is about 10% of the entire S9 UI, and even this doesn’t seem to be the bits that were released to manufacturing. I was disappointed. Unassured by their history of rather pedestrian firmware updates, I was pessimistic that Cowon would be entertaining the idea of updating the UI in any compelling way. Impatient, I decided to extract the UI from the newest firmware binaries (V.2.06).
Results
The UI is Split into a total of 19 version 7 SWFs. Amongst these is the loader, which is mainly responsible for loading and containing the various parts of the UI as they are required. Only one part of the UI is loaded at any one time (probably for simplicity, and to conserve memory) which explains why UI transitions are currently non-existent. The following table details what each remaining SWF does.
| Filename(s) | Description |
|---|
| Browser_total.swf |
The file/bookmarks/favourites explorer |
| Calc.swf |
The calculator utility. |
| Dictionary.swf, dictionary2.swf, dictionaryMain.swf |
The Dictionary interfaces. One seems to be a Korean to English dictionary, the other English to Korean, and dictionaryMain.swf is the dictionary’s main menu. |
| Dmb.swf |
The DMB viewer. The S9’s main menu won’t display the DMB icon depending on the exact firmware version. The DMB interface is only useful in areas which support it; namely Korea. |
| Init_country.swf |
Seems to be a means of setting regional information. I have not seen this interface on my S9; either only certain versions support localisation, or the option is only available on factory default settings. |
| Keyboard.swf |
A means to enter text into the S9. Probably for the dictionary. |
| Mainmenu1.swf, Mainmenu2.swf, Mainmenu3.swf |
The main menus for the S9. The first two are the standard menus on UK/US S9s (one with monochrome menu icons, the other with colour icons). The third seems to be an alternative menu that I haven’t seen on my S9. |
| Movie.swf |
The ‘now playing’ interface for video media. |
| Music.swf |
The ‘now playing’ interface for music media. Also includes the cover-flow user interface. |
| Picture.swf |
The picture viewer |
| Radio.swf |
The radio interface |
| Record.swf |
The microphone/line-in recording interface |
| Settings.swf |
The settings interface. Also includes custom configuration panes for things such as the equalizer, Bluetooth, the timer and alarm. |
| Text.swf |
The text viewer |
I am releasing these SWFs, along with their decompiled FLA (version 8/CS2) equivalents, for general consumption. I will not be supporting these files in any way, shape, or form. Use them at your own risk; I accept no responsibility for what you decide to do with them, even if that includes destroying your precious Cowon. Happy hacking.
Download here