VisorCentral.com (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/index.php)
- Visor & Deluxe (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=1)
-- OK, so what's the mic for? (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=654)

Well, I've been very pleased with my Visor Deluxe, but I'm dying to see what uses will come up for the microphone -- you know, the little tiny hole on the lower-left corner on the front of the visor. Audio recording? Any ideas?

Handspring did not include a voice recorder to be used with the microphone. (Why?) It's almost torture to have the 1st Palm Device with a microphone, but no voice recorder to use it with.


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Signing off,

C. Russell
[email protected]

While a microphone is built into the Visor case, it is kept seperate from the mainstream Visor hardware. The Mic connects directly to two pins inside the springboard slot so only certain springboards (voice recorder boards, cell phones etc) can take advantage of it.

Marcus

Can someone explain to me why they didn't just connect the microphone? Could you slap together a really inexpensive springboard that just redirects these two pins back into the visor that would allow at least some functionality for the microphone, even if not fancy? Would something need to happen to the OS to enable this or is just basic software needed to handle the input?

If you just start storing audio into the Visor's memory, you will fill it up really fast, especially with a 2 MB unit.

To really make voice recording practical, you need to do audio compression. I'm not sure the CPU built into the Visor is fast enough to do useful audio compression (it certainly isn't fast enough to do MP3). So, you would need to build in another chip (or a faster CPU) to do the compression. That would make the Visor cost more.

So, Handspring left it as an opportunity for someone to build a voice-recorder springboard.

That's my guess.