NEC Corp is still playing with Flash memory to create solid state sound recording devices, and has now come up with Voice Whisper, an alternative to those microcassette recorders that records about 30 minutes of speech per chip. The terminal is the size of a business card and uses a 32M-bit Flash memory chip to store the speech in digitised and compressed form. Big advantage over tape is random access, but Flash memory chips are still much too expensive for the 4 oz device to become a mass market item. NEC says it plans to use the system at museums and exhibitions and in electronic equipment such as Personal Digital Assistants.
