Why's it here?

So why do you need a voice recorder? Surely the one on your mobile phone is more than adequate? Well it might be if fine if you just want to grab a few seconds of a conversation here and there and there's at least one high profile occasion recently where mobile phone voice recorders have come in very handy.

However if you want to use a voice recorder regularly, or need to record long speeches then your phone probably won't cut it. It might not have enough storage and if you record for too long you won't have enough battery for other things.

Which is why there is still a strong market for devices like the Olympus WS-560M. Olympus has been making voice recorders for ages and these days is a clear leader in the market. These are nearly always bought by students and journalists but there are other professions for whom it makes sense to own one.

What's good?

I have to say that voice recorders have come a long way since I last played with one a few years ago. The WS-560M is ultra easy to use and has lots of very sensible features. The big step up for me is the inclusion of a flip out USB which means that you can hook the device up to your PC and not have to worry about finding the lead. The WS-560M also uses the USB as a charger too which means another lead you don't have to worry about.

Olympus has also kept the controls on the device very simple. There are nine buttons which are clearly marked and if you just want the basics and only want to edit or splice audio together it really is a case of record, stop and play with the sound coming out of the unit's reasonably good little speaker.

Other things we liked include storage levels of four Gigabytes, which might not sound like a huge amount but in reality grabs you more than 1000 hours in long play mode, though considerably less if you choose Stereo XQ which is the highest quality option. Use a higher mode and the Windows Media Audio files do sounds great.

One last little bonus is that Olympus has thrown in MP3 playback. So you can have a few of your own tunes on the device and then listen to them either via the speaker or though earphones.

What's bad?

Well it is hard to find fault with this product. If I was being picky I'd say that the screen is a little on the small side, but then it didn't really present a problem.

Overall

Coming in at over £100 this is still a little pricey for a voice recorder but if you want one i that is reliable delivers good quality results and is blindingly simple to use look no further.

The INQ Mini 3G packs in a lot of cool apps for a relatively low priced phone. Twitter, Facebook, Instant Messenger and Skype are all fully integrated. But can the budget handset handle its ambitious feature list?

Anna over at Shiny Shiny got to spend some time with the handset recently. Check out her views on the phone in the video below.

Rainy, windy weather can only mean one thing; time to get into the attic and dust off the board games. But we here at Tech Digest aren't satisfied with a musty box of Risk or Monopoly that's lost the Scottish Terrier piece. Oh no. We need a bit more bling for our pink £500 note.

Enter Pictionary Man, featuring an electronic Morph-alike to help you channel your inner Tony Hart. Click below to watch Shiny Shiny's Anna get rather excited in her video review.

There is nothing worse than having your music disturbed by external sources. Be it the noise of a train rattling through a tube tunnel during the morning commute, a hoody playing a pirate radio station out of a tinny phone speaker at the back of a bus or a road chomping jack-hammer drilling as much into your head as it does the street, regular headphones just can't defend your personal, harmonious music bubble from the outside racket of the modern world. AKG's K390 Noise-Cancelling earphones aim to thwart these sonic invaders, with varying levels of success.

AKG K390 earphones certainly look the part with a shiny black plastic casing and matte trimmings. The elegant curves of the earphones are durable too, with reinforced cabling near the ear piece protecting from any sudden tugs.

The earbuds and sound apertures themselves are a little large, though the earphones do ship with numerous replaceable sizes. Putting the earbuds in at first feels a little like the sensation of wearing ear-plugs, magnifying the sound of your own head as it were. But once you have some tunes playing through them, the earphones have a bright, full sound with good bass response and a clean high-end.

Active noise-cancellation is solid. A trek down noisy Oxford Street and on to a busy tube made no impression on my music, even with the volume down relatively low. The active noise-cancellation once switched on did produce a slight hissing sound that muddied bass frequencies, but overall made a huge difference to the clarity of my music.

However, the active noise-cancelling module is a rather bulky piece. It does fine in terms of features; it's good to see that it has a mute function and a switch for active/passive noise cancellation, and that it gets a decent run out of a single AAA battery. However its size (about 3 inches in length and an inch tall) and weight can make it a little cumbersome. It's placement along the length of cable is also too high, meaning that it cant be placed in a trouser pocket when out and about and in use, which is a shame.

Packaged in along with the replaceable earbuds are a stereo patch cable for connecting up other audio sources and a rather sleek carry case. It's also worth noting that the AKG K390 earphones also work as a hands free kit and do a good job of this secondary purpose.

The AKG K390 Noise-Cancelling earphones do a great job of defending your music from outside intrusion. However, a weighty noise-cancelling module drag the earphones down. They are pricey (you wont get much change out of £150) but the quality of the sound produced still make them a worthy purchase.

4/5

Click here to check out the product homepage: AKG K390 Noise-Cancelling earphones

Anna from Shiny Shiny recently got to spend some time with Emporia's TalkPremium, a handset for those who aren't fussed about the bells-and-whistles of modern smartphones . Check out her video review to see how it shapes up.

Tech Digest recently got their hands on a HTC HD2 handset. Check out this video feature to see how it shapes up.

HTC are billing the Touch 2 as a compact alternative to more pricey smartphones. But can it really compete with the mighty iPhone, or even their own excellent Hero handset?

The HTC Touch 2 boots up the Windows Mobile 6.5 OS. Anyone who remembers the previous offerings of Windows Mobile may rightly wince at this news, with the OS being notoriously flaky to navigate. However, breath easy; HTC have re-skinned the OS with their own TouchFlo interface.

The TouchFlo interface does a great job of getting you around the various functions of the phone. A scrolling shortcut bar at the bottom of the home screen allows for quick navigation to common tools such as messaging, contacts, internet browsers and other programs. Once selected from this scroll bar, options for these functions then fill only the top half of the screen, allowing you to quickly move to another application again via the scroll bar.

The start menu is also pretty nifty, with a scrolling grid of applications easily accessed. The phone can handle multi-tasking pretty well, with its 528MHz processor juggling music, multi-tabbed web browsing and photo viewing with admirable ease. Having a Windows style Task Manager made switching between applications easy too, and I found its drop down menu clear and easily navigable.

The HTC Touch 2 ships with a host of apps including YouTube, Facebook and Google Maps straight out of the box, and they all function pretty much as you would imagine. Though Windows Mobile Marketplace is still in its infancy, it's nice to know the HTC Touch 2 will be able to hold its own once more apps are available. Interestingly, HTC have chosen Opera rather than Internet Explorer as the default web browser. Both have their pros and cons. Opera sometimes garbled up images on the phone, so I tended to use Internet Explorer, but it's a matter of taste in the end.

What is not a matter of taste however is my low opinion of the HTC Touch 2's rather poor touch screen. Credit given where credit is due, visually it's excellent. The 2.8-inch TFT-LCD is clear and bright, and again, matched with the TouchFlo interface, is really slick to look at. It's such a shame then that the touch-screen itself is so unresponsive. The HTC Touch 2 favours a resistive rather than capacitive screen, which means it requires a fair bit of pressure to get a response back from the phone. When accessing large icons this is fine, but when you get to fiddly functions in the UI, such as scroll bars on browsers or text input, the HTC Touch 2 is an absolute mare to use. Far too often did my fingers accidentally open up the wrong applications or call the wrong contact. And I have dainty piano-playing fingers, might I add. Add to this the bizarre omission of an accelerometer, making landscape use a chore, and the screen just doesn't live up to expectations.

The inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone jack is great news for anyone planning on using the phone to regularly play music and video. Both the audio library and photo/video albums are very easy to use, making the HTC Touch 2 a worthy pocket-sized media player. However, the phone ships with only a meagre 512MB of internal memory, so a MicroSD upgrade will be necessary to get the most out of the phone's media abilities.

You wont be needing a memory upgrade for storing photos however, as you are unlikely to want to use the built in 3.2 mega pixel camera. It is pretty shoddy. Though the phone's touch sensitive zoom bar is a strong point for the camera (and also particularly useful when web browsing), the camera's inability to focus adequately or adjust sufficiently to differing lighting ranges makes it hard to recommend.

The HTC Touch 2 is a pretty sturdy phone for its tiny size (104 X 55 X 12.9 mm), and pretty sleekly designed too. It's curved edges and pinched lower lip make it quite comfortable to hold, and at 110 grams it's as light as a feather too. The inset buttons are nicely sized, and the resistive screen looks as though it could take a decent bashing before going all the colours of the rainbow.

Conclusion

There is a lot to like about the HTC Touch 2. It has an incredibly clear screen, handles multi-tasking very well, looks smooth in your hand, and has an excellent interface in the shape of the TouchFlo. However, a touch screen phone lives or dies by the usability of its touch screen, and here the HTC Touch 2 becomes difficult to recommend. Not a bad phone by any means, but it certainly falls short of greatness.

Here's Anna's (from Shiny Shiny) video review