It's hard to get excited over a dedicated voice recorder these days, especially when smartphones have tried to step in and fill that role. But when it's vital that you capture every word in an interview, a voice recorder is still the best tool for the job. And Olympus has now made them even better with built-in Wi-Fi that lets you control its new DM-901 from a smartphone app, letting you get as close as possible to your subject.
So instead of rushing to get a front row seat at a presentation so you can be as close to the speaker as possible, you can simply place the DM-901 on the podium and then sit wherever you please, starting or stopping the recording from your phone. You can even adjust the microphone's pickup pattern from afar, if you want to capture more of what's going on in a room. Your smartphone's mic is designed to serve as a crude speakerphone at best, and can't even come close to the sound quality captured by the DM-901's pair of high-quality microphones.
The $200 DM-901 also lets you snap photos on your smartphone and associate them to a recording, so it's easier to search through long lists of audio files and find exactly the one you want. And it lets you upload recordings to Dropbox for archival purposes, or easy sharing.
It comes with four gigs of internal memory by default, but that can be greatly expanded with a 64GB SD card, and on a single charge the DM-901 will keep recording for an impressive 29 hours. So not only does it keep your smartphone's battery from draining during a long recording session, it also keeps it free for more important uses—namely games. [Olympus]