Having the ability to record your mobile conversations is a huge plus in both business and personal life. In business, it is an accurate way to review exactly what action points were covered and what follow up is needed. The recording is literally your personal secretary for the meeting, giving error-free recollection of what was said, no matter how complicated it was. In personal life, it may be a grocery list, a restaurant take out order, or the driving directions to get to a friend’s house. The added advantage of having a recording of a call is that you can forward the call recording to someone else, thus saving the time of re-hashing all of the key points of a meeting verbally with someone who was not in the meeting.

ReMo Recorder provides exactly these capability for both S60 5th Edition and S60 3rd Edition devices. For those with Nokia N97 devices such as myself, this type of functionality may sound familiar. After all, the Nokia N97 comes pre-loaded with a memo and call-recording app called Recorder. It can be found on the device by going to the menu, clicking on the Applications icon, and then clicking on the Recorder icon.

The Recorder app is pre-loaded on the Nokia N97

ReMo presents two  app icons, one for settings and a second to start the app. The icons are installed under Menu/Applications and look like this:

What’s the difference? Well, a couple of things. One is that the ReMo app lets you choose whether or not you want a beep tone to be entered into the phone call every 5 seconds or not. When all parties are in agreement that the conversation can be recorded, the elimination of the beep can be the elimination of a distraction. Imagine, for example, a conference call among 12 people in the field where each had to insert a beep into the audio every 5 seconds. Because of the differences from device to device in handling recording functions, ReMo also inserts two additional modes in the Settings portion by which a user can bypass the beep. If the default ‘No’ still produces a beep on the users device (it works fine on my N97), then No (mode 1) or No (mode 2) will silence the beep on the user’s device.

The second thing is that ReMo Recorder is really the front end of a much more elaborate business-oriented recording service maintained by the South African company Spescom Mobile Solutions Ltd. The corporate business service is described in more detail on their website, and it includes the ability to capture video calls as well as voice calls, and store them securely on Spescom’s server. A manual for the extended service can also be used to describe the free trial app, and it can be downloaded from the developer’s website along with a brochure of the service.

Firing up the ReMo Recorder app was as easy as double-clicking on the icon. A simple screen appears with Record, Stop, and Play buttons. I called a friend, clicked the record button, and recorded a clear two-way conversation between us, and then clicked on the Stop button.

A word of caution at this point: The ReMo recorder defaults to labeling each recording as Memo, expecting you to change that label for each recording. If you don’t change the label, you may record over a previously saved file.

The audio files are very compact, using less than 2.5 megabytes of storage for an hour-long recording. For devices that do not already have the Recorder app pre-loaded, the ReMo Recorder represents a great leap in utility. For those who do have the Recorder app pre-loaded, ReMo represents only an incremental advance, primarily with its beep and non-beep options.

A free, 14-day trial version of ReMo Recorder is available in the Ovi Store at . A full version of the app is available in Ovi Store for $6.99 (USD).

ReMo Recorder is available for a wide variety of devices, including the Nokia E Series and N Series, 6000 series, Nokia 3000 and 5000 series devices. See the online brochure for the full listing.