It used to be that back in the day, companies would create devices specifically created for audio recording. These used to be used by musicians and journalists to record audio snippets; in fact there are still plenty of journalists out there who probably still rely on good old fashioned voice recorders when conducting interviews.
This is despite the fact that our smartphones these days are more than capable of getting the job done. That being said, Philips seems to think that maybe they have found a happy middle between old school and new school, and have since launched a device called the SpeechAir. This is essentially an Android-powered voice recorder.
As you can see in the video above, on the surface the SpeechAir looks like it could be a smartphone. However it comes with three different microphones: one for 360-degree audio recording which might be handy for meetings; one directional microphone for speech recognition, and one MEMS microphone for making VOIP calls.
To top things off, the SpeechAir also comes with software that will automatically protect all your recordings with 256-bit AES encryption, so if you’re looking to protect a source or information, this might come in handy. No word on pricing just yet but this will definitely cost more than your standard voice recorder.