MP3, ce 2.11 and an external microphone

I am sorry to deluge you with so many questions at once. I live in China and have been working with a tablet pc for a year and find that, while more useful than a typical notebook the battery life is too limiting - also batteries cost a small fortune.

I am trying to move out my tablet pc apps to pda's and am finding that one is just not enough. I would like to find a pda and dedicate it to playing mp3's and recording voice from lectures, meetings, etc. I really want to find one that will accept an external microphone. black and white is preferable because they usually have better battery life - also standard AA batteries is a big plus.

Any ideas? I know that there are mp3 players out there that will do these functions and are much lighter but I have other uses for this pda in mind as well.

Thanks

no problem with questions but if there's a chance to create only one or two topics it would be better but if your questions really belong to many categories then i don't know of another way

hmm, colour pda's don't necessarily have weak battery life! a good example is a jornada 720/728 with a rebuilt 2400 mAh battery it can compete with a greyscale hpc running off AA's.. i'm not kidding!
the jornada 7xx are good at mp3/recording too as far as i know.. though i don't think it would accept a microphone. it has its own .. it might not be as good as an external one but should be OK. (i own jornada 7xx's but i've never tried this function)

Does your handheld have a microphone jack? The MP780 I use has a combination headpiece jack (mono earphone and microphone in one) that's pretty easy to hack. The socket diameter is smaller than a common stereo jack though, but it is compatible with the minijacks used on many cellphones. You can modify it into a directional, or cut and splice it into a wireless receiver. Something like this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=73842&item=5787565548&rd=1

Then you can place the microphone anywhere within range, up close to the target, and have the wireless receiver plugged into your unit as it's microphone. Have to do impedence matching of course.

Good for recording meetings or lectures... or unfaithful spouses...

oh, and Bruised said that he can get a generic earpiece/mic combo set for $1 or something. Bruised?

If you're skilled with soldering iron, you could even make your own. The plug is a (semi) standard 2.5mm stereo jack, you'll just have to find out which line is mic and which one are the speakers. then you can plug whatever you want on the other side (another jack, a bigger female connector, etc)

Wow! Thanks for the info...I have been looking at the mobilepro 780 for a while. Have you ever tried recording with it? When you are recording something can you also be using it for some other application, i.e. writing on the screen or typing, without a decrease in performance? Which version of ce does this have?

I have a casio pa 2400U with ce 2.0. If I install a standard microphone jack in the case and splice into the built in microphone wiring do you think there would be enough power for a simple external microphone? Is there any good software out there for voice recording with ce 2.0?

Thanks again.



Edited by pengyou 2005-07-08 8:17 AM

Yeah, I have a jornada 720, and I can tell you that the recording quality is pretty damn good! I mean for what it is, I am happy with it, I use it to record singing and stuff like that sometimes, and it's sweet.

...........IB a n e

i wont think the power supplied by the mini jack could power anything else than a mini microphone, like the ones found in cell phone headsets. but maybe you could try one of those.

The MP780 is a CE2.11 core device running HPC/Pro. It's not as powerful, and has an older OS, but it's cheaper and readily available. Plus if you like to program your own apps and do hardware hacking, it's perfect for the tinkerer. Yes, you can type notes and scribble on the MP780 while recording. But beware that if you have it set to dump the audio stream to the compact flash card, that if you load or open a largish file from the same card there may be gaps in the recording. It also depends on the sound quality you set it at. The higher the sound quality, the more data it has to stream and hence the more suceptible it will be to user actions. Lastly, typing while recording with the onboard microphone produces an audio file full of keyboard clicks....

With regard to the external microphone, usually it's ok so long as you stick with non-powered ones or use an impedence match. An easy hack is to use a small speaker. Any regular voicecoil speaker can function as a fairly decent microphone.

Edited by Zapper 2005-07-09 3:26 PM