Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This thing is amazing! Audio Quality I recently recorded a company's public board meeting, which I attended in person by sitting near the back of a large auditorium space. The speakers used microphones, but the audio coming through the speakers was muted and monotone. I often strained to hear (with my own ears) what was being said during the course of the meeting. Having used the lecture capture setting, when I went to listen to my recording, I could clearly make out every statement by the speakers, and lots of snippets of conversations nearby! (Yes, there was overlap, but it was easily distinguishable in the recorded audio track.) I stress the usability of the audio for later listening particularly. I spent 6 hours in a lecture yesterday sitting next to a circulating fan blowing at full tilt, next to a water cooler, 10 yards from the a panel of soft-spoken speakers without microphones, sitting in an echo-chamber of a conference room. I could usably understand just about everything said during that discussion. No where near the quality needed for a video's audio track, but no less than amazing for my use in capturing the content and value of these events! My iPhone would kill to have this functionality. Instead, like a garage queen '69 mustang, the iPhone sits collecting dust in the holster of my hip pocket, relegated to bouts of candy crush during the infrequent and oh-too-short recesses. You're totally able to monitor the live recording through the 3.5 mm headphone jack too. A nice feature, attesting to the audio bona fides of the manufacturer. Battery Life Ridiculously good. I don't regularly use other audio recording devices apart from my iPhone 6 or my laptop. I use a Zoom H2n for higher-quality audio capture, but only for short capture times (like 5 minutes or less) because I plan on post-processing that audio. For the audio I capture with this Sony device, I play it back a couple times and then I delete the file, never processing or editing the files at all. That's just how I use it. Anyhow, this thing routinely captures 8-hour days of meetings (like 6.5 hours with breaks) over two or three days without breaking a sweat! I usually put in fresh batteries before a marathon like that, but I've never run out of juice with this mighty mouse recorder even after going weeks between battery changes -- many many months if I'm not regularly using it. In other words, I would trust this device to receive the full spoken text of the gospels on a single set of batteries, without fail. You don't believe it could do it, you say? Have faith, my friend, and you shall see that this recorder will walk on water and can summon the dead (muhahaha). Style and Usability It's a black brick phone without speed dial. Then again, your mother-in-law will never be able to strangle you through it. Scratch that. If she gets her grubby hands on this sweet piece of kit while you're not looking, it's so simple that she'd surely be able to drop a couple sound bombs into the files for your later listening pleasure. But seriously. It's really simple. There's a big red button to start recording. If you press that again, it pauses recording and can resume (i.e., a continuous audio file). Alternatively, you can press the square button (I assume this is the symbol known throughout the nine realms as the "stope button") to ... stop recording. (This closes up a single audio file. Pressing the big red button will start a new audio file recording.) The instructions could be reduced to "don't swallow it" and everyone would still be able to use 95% of it's functionality. That it has an FM radio is kind of awesome, because why not? What else is there to say? It's simple. It's easy. It works really well for a range of tasks, and doesn't waste any space or weight trying to do anything else. Except the radio. But that's just a nice, effortless feature.