DM-901 Black Voice Recorder 4GB with DM-901 Black Voice Recorder 4GB with

I have just amended this review and downgraded it from 2 stars to only one star. This device has now frozen on two occasions while it was switched on and recording and could only be restarted by removing and replacing the battery. If you want a reliable device then this is not the one to buy.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++This is a small lightweight device. Easy to carry around in your pocket. Very good battery life - and even with the built in memory, you can get a huge amount of recording done. I can't imagine why anyone might need to buy an additional memory card - although if you wanted to pay podcasts or music then you might want to - but then why not use your phone?Quality of recordings are excellent - but this is not rocket science nowadays - so recording quality is a given.After that, everything is pretty basic. There are silly little niggles such as if you press the recording button and if you aren't in the right place in the menu, it nags you that recording can't be done there and it refuses to record. Surely, if you have switched it on and you want to record, it should just go ahead and do it.It has a nice looking little LED screen with little coloured icons - but they aren't all necessary. No one wants to watch the screen of a voice recorder - so they are just a gadget. Don't buy this recorder because it has a pretty screen. A normal text menu will do just the same job. The real downer of the screen is that it isn't bright enough in daylight - even in only moderate sunlight. You simply can't see what you are doing. The screen appears black. I have a previous Olympus recorder with a small backlit text screen and it is always legible. Olympus have sacrificed visibility in order to have an icon/bauble filled LED screen that is often impossible to use unless you stop what you are doing and shield it under your jacket or something. You'd think that they would test this out at the design stage.Another strange thing is the amount of time it takes for this recorder to boot up. Probably a good 5 seconds. This is a long long time if you suddenly want to start recording something quickly. Why on earth should it take so long. Is the operating system so complicated that booting up is such a time-consuming process? I suspect that it has to do with producing the graphics necessary to display the pretty screen icons. So this is another Olympus double whammy. The unit is compromised by a graphics display which is unnecessary and which helps to spoil the user experience.The menu options are pretty normal but one thing which is really flawed is the erase function. You can either erase the entire contents of a folder - or you can erase a single file. However, you don't get an opportunity to erase a selected/checked file - or multiple selected files - which you would expect to be able to do with any kind of device - phones or cameras etc. Here you erase the file which happens to be highlighted at the time and after you have pressed erase, there is nothing to flag up which file you are erasing. It is VERY VERY easy to have highlighted the wrong file and to make an irreversible deletion.BEWARE!Also - why on earth doesn't it use easily sourceable AAA batteries? Instead it uses proprietary batteries which are expensive, need special chargers (not supplied) and so might leave you in a lurch if by some accident your batteries are discharged.The thing which really attracted me to this device is the fact that it can connect to your phone so that you can upload files to it and then send them off to the Cloud if you want.A great idea ... but - Olympus have chosen to do this using WiFi - not Bluetooth. An extraordinary choice.This means that you have to disable your present wifi internet connection on your phone, connect it to the recorder intranet and upload the files then disconnect your phone from the recorder intranet, reconnect to your wifi internet and then send the files to the Cloud.If they had used Bluetooth - like pretty well any other device in the world, it would all have been pretty well seamless. What a nuisance and how unnecessary.Also, in order to use this function you have to install a free app on your phone. This is not a problem but the app is extremely basic. There is a good connection system to your recorder using a QR code - but once you have uploaded the file to your phone, the app only allows you to connect with DropBox - so if you use Google Drive, or OneDrive or Evernote - or any other cloud service, you will have to upload your files using their apps directly. This is not really a problem, though because I'm blowed if I can figure out to get the Olympus app to upload the files to their chosen partner - Dropbox, anyway.It looks to me as if Olympus has done a deal with DropBox and that the app was only half finished before someone lost interest.The phone app does allow you to control the recording device remotely and so if you want to make clandestine recordings, you might find this useful - but once again you lose your external wifi internet functionality while you do this.I see that Olympus are releasing a slightly more featured model of this recorder called the DM-7. Looking at the spec, there is nothing there to address the shortcomings I have listed above - and it costs a shed-load more money - and this one, the DM-901 is already expensive enough.I suggest that people look elsewhere for their recorder. If this is the best that Olympus can do then they are heading for a fall.**************************************Update - the start up/boot up time now seems to have deteriorated to 11 seconds - even though I have formatted the internal memory. This really is unacceptably slow for a tiny device which really isn't trying to do very much at all.The second thing - which I forgot to put in my review originally is that Olympus has insisted on using an older style USB port for charging the batteries. This really is ridiculous. Just as every other company has mainly moved towards a universal charging cable, if you want to travel with your Olympus, you have to remember to pack a special charging cable just for the recorder - or else risk running out of power.I can only imagine that Olympus had a box of old bits left over from previous models and decided to use those in order to save a few pence.For a device costing this kind of money - is decidedly NOT consumer-facing and decidedly IS hugely unfair.Should I downgrade them to a single star????

I have just amended this review and downgraded it from 2 stars to only one star. This device has now frozen on two occasions while it was switched on and recording and could only be restarted by removing and replacing the battery. If you want a reliable device then this is not the one to buy.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++This is a small lightweight device. Easy to carry around in your pocket. Very good battery life - and even with the built in memory, you can get a huge amount of recording done. I can't imagine why anyone might need to buy an additional memory card - although if you wanted to pay podcasts or music then you might want to - but then why not use your phone?Quality of recordings are excellent - but this is not rocket science nowadays - so recording quality is a given.After that, everything is pretty basic. There are silly little niggles such as if you press the recording button and if you aren't in the right place in the menu, it nags you that recording can't be done there and it refuses to record. Surely, if you have switched it on and you want to record, it should just go ahead and do it.It has a nice looking little LED screen with little coloured icons - but they aren't all necessary. No one wants to watch the screen of a voice recorder - so they are just a gadget. Don't buy this recorder because it has a pretty screen. A normal text menu will do just the same job. The real downer of the screen is that it isn't bright enough in daylight - even in only moderate sunlight. You simply can't see what you are doing. The screen appears black. I have a previous Olympus recorder with a small backlit text screen and it is always legible. Olympus have sacrificed visibility in order to have an icon/bauble filled LED screen that is often impossible to use unless you stop what you are doing and shield it under your jacket or something. You'd think that they would test this out at the design stage.Another strange thing is the amount of time it takes for this recorder to boot up. Probably a good 5 seconds. This is a long long time if you suddenly want to start recording something quickly. Why on earth should it take so long. Is the operating system so complicated that booting up is such a time-consuming process? I suspect that it has to do with producing the graphics necessary to display the pretty screen icons. So this is another Olympus double whammy. The unit is compromised by a graphics display which is unnecessary and which helps to spoil the user experience.The menu options are pretty normal but one thing which is really flawed is the erase function. You can either erase the entire contents of a folder - or you can erase a single file. However, you don't get an opportunity to erase a selected/checked file - or multiple selected files - which you would expect to be able to do with any kind of device - phones or cameras etc. Here you erase the file which happens to be highlighted at the time and after you have pressed erase, there is nothing to flag up which file you are erasing. It is VERY VERY easy to have highlighted the wrong file and to make an irreversible deletion.BEWARE!Also - why on earth doesn't it use easily sourceable AAA batteries? Instead it uses proprietary batteries which are expensive, need special chargers (not supplied) and so might leave you in a lurch if by some accident your batteries are discharged.The thing which really attracted me to this device is the fact that it can connect to your phone so that you can upload files to it and then send them off to the Cloud if you want.A great idea ... but - Olympus have chosen to do this using WiFi - not Bluetooth. An extraordinary choice.This means that you have to disable your present wifi internet connection on your phone, connect it to the recorder intranet and upload the files then disconnect your phone from the recorder intranet, reconnect to your wifi internet and then send the files to the Cloud.If they had used Bluetooth - like pretty well any other device in the world, it would all have been pretty well seamless. What a nuisance and how unnecessary.Also, in order to use this function you have to install a free app on your phone. This is not a problem but the app is extremely basic. There is a good connection system to your recorder using a QR code - but once you have uploaded the file to your phone, the app only allows you to connect with DropBox - so if you use Google Drive, or OneDrive or Evernote - or any other cloud service, you will have to upload your files using their apps directly. This is not really a problem, though because I'm blowed if I can figure out to get the Olympus app to upload the files to their chosen partner - Dropbox, anyway.It looks to me as if Olympus has done a deal with DropBox and that the app was only half finished before someone lost interest.The phone app does allow you to control the recording device remotely and so if you want to make clandestine recordings, you might find this useful - but once again you lose your external wifi internet functionality while you do this.I see that Olympus are releasing a slightly more featured model of this recorder called the DM-7. Looking at the spec, there is nothing there to address the shortcomings I have listed above - and it costs a shed-load more money - and this one, the DM-901 is already expensive enough.I suggest that people look elsewhere for their recorder. If this is the best that Olympus can do then they are heading for a fall.**************************************Update - the start up/boot up time now seems to have deteriorated to 11 seconds - even though I have formatted the internal memory. This really is unacceptably slow for a tiny device which really isn't trying to do very much at all.The second thing - which I forgot to put in my review originally is that Olympus has insisted on using an older style USB port for charging the batteries. This really is ridiculous. Just as every other company has mainly moved towards a universal charging cable, if you want to travel with your Olympus, you have to remember to pack a special charging cable just for the recorder - or else risk running out of power.I can only imagine that Olympus had a box of old bits left over from previous models and decided to use those in order to save a few pence.For a device costing this kind of money - is decidedly NOT consumer-facing and decidedly IS hugely unfair.Should I downgrade them to a single star????