Cowon this morning said it has started shipping the S9 Curve to the US. Like the original version, the media player is Cowon's closest equivalent to the iPod touch and centers on a 3.3-inch active matrix OLED with a capacitive touchscreen; the display is both more color-accurate than Apple's and supports the same pressure-free finger input, although without multi-touch gestures. The display is limited to 480x272 is supported by a processor that can decode 720x480 MPEG-4 video versus the 640x480 limit of the iPod.

The player further has an accelerometer to re-orient the display based on tilt as well as Bluetooth 2.0 to support wireless stereo headphones. Cowon further boasts an improved spatialization for its audio engine and has optimized the battery further to last for 55 hours of pure audio and 11 hours of video. It supports DivX, MPEG-4 and WMV for video and adds rarer standards like APE, FLAC and OGG to the more common audio formats.

Sales should start on the 19th through retailers like Amazon and will see 8GB and 16GB models ship for $200 and $240 respectively.