Ever find your self in need of a recording application for your Android phone? If so, the Droids have reviewed a nice option just for you, the Recordoid Dictaphone application from Android developer Somyac. This is a great example of an Android application done right. To start with, the design of the application, from it’s icon to user interface, is done very well and with style.
I installed the version 2.0.0 of the Lite variant of the application from the Android Market without any problems at all. It rings in at around 700KB of space. From application selection to usability is a quick five seconds from a cold start. After the short splash screen, you are presented with an old school style tape recorder with four buttons: Record, Play, Search and Settings.
Recordoid Main Screen
From there it’s a one press workload to begin recording your first dictation onto your Android. When you have completed your recording, simply press the stop button.
Recordoid Recording
Upon completion of your recording, you will be prompted to enter a title for the recording, but if you don’t feel like it, no worries, it will default the title to a standard number sequence if you don’t want to bother with the title yet. After that, it’s all set for your next recording.
At any time, you can go back and review your recordings by pressing the Play button, which will bring up a list of the recordings you have created. Clicking on a recording opens it’s options with a slide down affect bringing forward a number of buttons; Play, Stop, Notes, Location, Edit and Delete.
Recordoid Playlist
Recordoid Single Recording View
The Play and Stop functions are straight forward. Notes allows you to add written notes to the recording and each recording has the start and stop time and date for the recordings saved there by default. The location button allows you to see where you took that particular recording, if you have that feature enabled which we will discuss later. Edit will allow you to rename the recording, set it as a ringtone or email it to someone.
Recordoid Edit Recording
Finally, Delete does just that, it deletes the recording.
Back on the main screen we will move to the right with the buttons. Let’s say you have a number of recordings and you just can’t remember which one you made about Elvis. No worries, there is a nice search feature which doesn’t just search your titles, but also searches in the notes. You can also limit the searches to dates.
Recordoid Search
Finally, we get to Settings. The settings button brings up a short list of options for Recordoid. The first on the list is the default maximum length of recordings in time length scale. In the lite version reviewed here, the maximum length is 3min. You can toggle on and off the sound effects, which provide a nice “Clicky” sound that mimics your old cassette recorder nicely. As mentioned above, you can also enable location settings for the recording, which does require a GPS signal, for a review of where you made a particular recording on the Google map.
Recordoid Settings 1
With a little scrolling the user is presented with the option for audio format, 3GP or WAV and finally the speaker volume for audio play back and those neat little sound effects mentioned above. With the quality setting, you do have to consider the trade off. I have included two recordings I did, one with 3GP and one with WAV to showcase the different quality and WAV definitely has better quality, but for general dictation and notes, 3GP will work fine.
Recordoid Settings 2
That’s it. That’s the whole application. Not much to it, but there doesn’t need to be. It’s simple, clean, easy to use and has a great user interface. I would highly recommend this application to anyone looking for a way to quickly take dictation on their Android phone.
