Now hear this: voice memos on the iPhone?

Doug, a fellow resident of the greater Boston metropolitan area, wrote in to ask about the state of voice memos on the iPhone. You’ve long been able to buy an add-on for your iPod that attaches to the dock-connector port and lets you record messages that are then transferred to iTunes. But Doug was concerned that the iPhone doesn’t support seem to support these features.

Yes, there is no native support for recording on the iPhone, but there are some workarounds if this is a must have piece of functionality for you. Which way you go depends very much on whether you’re interested in jailbreaking your phone.

If you don’t mind going through the extra process of jailbreaking (which these days is really as simple as downloading an application and hitting a button), then you can use the Installer.app to download Erica Sadun’s Voice Notes application. Voice Notes is pretty simple: it lets you record using the iPhone built-in mic and play back with the iPhone’s speaker. However, it won’t let you sync your voice memos with iTunes, like the iPod accessories do—instead, you can choose to email the memos. You can also import your voicemail into Voice Notes, which can be quite useful if you want to access them on a computer.

On the other hand, if jailbreaking isn’t your cup of tea, then you might consider the free service Reqall. Once you’ve set up an account, all you do is dial a number on your phone to leave a message—Reqall will then transcribe your message into text, and allow you to retrieve it on the web, via IM, or on your phone. Plus, they’ve got a snazzy iPhone-specific web-based interface.

There’s always the chance that Apple will add this functionality to the iPhone, or that a third-party might make an app in June, but if you don’t want to wait in the meantime, then perhaps one of these solutions will tide you over until then.

Category: Software

Posted by Dan Moren on Apr 21 2008, 3:21 PM ET

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