Menneisyys

There has always been a great demand for phone conversation recording applications on both the Palm OS and the Pocket PC Phone Editionplatform. On the Pocket PC, there is only one app to offer seamless phone conversation recording capabilities: the great, free PMRecorder reviewed here. Now, there is a new application that promises something similar.

Availability

The application is available here and costs $24.99.

Review

While it’s primarily meant for Palm Treo devices (both Palm OS (I couldn’t test the Palm version because I don’t have a Palm 650 / 700p and the app isn’t compatible with any other Palm-based device. For example, on my T3, it wouldn’t even start) and Windows Mobile), it runs (with some display problems) on any Windows Mobile device.

In the Pocket PC version, it’s only possible to record using the PCM encoding (read: it isn't even able to use theoperating system's GSM vocoder); it’s only the sampling rate that can be modified. The Palm OS version boasts of a built-in advanced codec (maybe ADPCM?) resulting in a 4-times better compression.

In my opinion, for Windows Mobile users, $24.99 for this app is a bit too much, particularly if you take into account that

1. as far as call recording is considered, PMRecorder is free and is considerably more capable (it has support for the much more space-saving GSM vocoder; it sits in the background, waits for and auto-records incoming/outgoing calls without your having to initiate this and it also stores the phone number of the caller/called in the file). On the Pocket PC, mVoice does NOT automatically record calls, unlike on the Palm; in this respect, it’s clearly inferior to PMRecorder.
2. as a “simple” voice/sound recorder (not primarily meant for phone call recording), there are a lot of much more capable and much better stand-alone voice/sound recorders; for example, the cheaper (!) and, still, much more capable Resco Audio Recorder.

All in all, I do NOT recommend this application to any Windows Mobile users (Palm OS is an entirely different question). If you need (as opposed to mVoice, automatic!) call recording, get the free PMRecorder; if you just need an easy-to-handle voice recorder, check out Everything you may need to know about sound recording on the Pocket PC and choose a sound recorder that suits your needs.

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MS MVP- Mobile Devices.