Perfect for my needs
Written: Aug 10 '02 (Updated Sep 18 '02)
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Pros: Excellent sound quality, good battery life, small and light.
Cons: Rats, I lost my first one.
The Bottom Line: I like it so much that when I lost my first one, I bought another.
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| kthoennes's Full Review: Panasonic RR-QR100 (8 MB, 1.5 Hours) Handheld Digi... |
I'm a manager in a busy government unit. I didn't want to carry yet another piece of junk, along with the cell phone, PDA, watch, fountain pen, ID card, access card, wallet. Going through metal detectors all day is a pain in the neck. On the other hand, I get badly scattered and forgetful. I used to use my cell phone to leave myself voicemail messages, but that was dumb. I tried those old microcassette recorders, but they were a pain -- heavy, garbled, metal, and I had to fool with the tapes, cumbersome linear recording, etc. I needed a digital recorder.
The Panasonic unit is perfect. It's so small I velcro'd it to the backside of my security access card that I wear on a lanyard around my neck. It's just a little bigger than a business card. In fact, it's about the size of a business card holder. Although the case looks metal, I think it's just plastic with a metal film -- anyway, even with a couple AAA batteries inside it doesn't set off most metal detectors, unless they're set very high, and so that's one less thing I have to take off at the screening stations. The sound quality is great, nice and clear. The little rolling wheel on the corner of the unit is a really neat feature. It lets you scroll & roll through the messages in a very convenient, one-handed way. I just bought my second one after losing the first -- I had the first one for about four months, and never had to change the batteries -- even though I accidentally recorded the inside of my pocket for an hour at least three or four times. I also inadvertently recorded a dinner conversation among four people in a noisy restaurant when I accidentally touched it inside my jacket pocket, and the recording was still nice and clear (and really funny, but that's another story), even from inside my jacket. There's a locking feature on the unit -- I don't mean to give the impression that you'll always be recording things by accident. I just never bothered to be careful with it.
It also has a feature to split one message into two separate messages, but since most of my messages are just a sentence or a phrase, I never used that feature. It also has a sub-file system, four different folders you can use to categorize the messages. For example, you can put work-related messages in file "A", personal-life messages in file "B", and so on, A thru D. I'm not that much of an organization freak, but it's there if you want to use it.
Finally, I dropped it onto pavement a few times, and it always worked fine, except the battery cover would pop off and go flying, and sometimes I'd have to reset the time and date. Taking out the batteries does *not* wipe out the messages, that's nice. They're still there when you power it back up. I baked it in a hot car once and the LCD display got dark, but it lightened back up to normal as soon as it cooled off. Pretty tough unit.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): $69
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Epinions.com ID:
kthoennes
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Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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