Hurry up: Great app sold at 40% discount!!! The dictaphone functionality of mobile phones is usually getting overlooked by users– most just buy dictaphone gadgets. Meanwhile phones are very capable to do the recording and even more — they have connectivity to share recordings immediately after they were completed. There are handful of recorders for iPhone in the App Store but until VR+ none of them were able to effectively deliver this basic functionality on iPhone as well as awesome Voice Activity Detection (VAD) which gives you time to think what are you actually recording!

VR+ has it all — it is an audio recorder that most of users has been waiting for. Creators of VR+ made a great job on usability, selecting minimum set of necessary features which includes

* Files get recorded in mp3 format that can be easily e-mailed or shared.
* Recordings can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Blogger.
* Ability to customize e-mails: reply address, subject and body of the e-mail
* Audio can be e-mailed as MP3 attachment or as a link
* Free online storage for recordings
* Voice Activity Detection — a new feature which removes awkward pauses while you are talking.

The application worked well right after the installation, almost without any configuration at all and without any urge to read help in order to operate it. Controls were easy and intuitive to me. It took me only a minute to sign up for free online storage and I was able to start recording.

Large control buttons on the main page are easy to push. Recordings can be shared, continued, deleted or renamed with a couple of clicks by selecting one of the intuitive options in the dialog which appears when recording is selected from the list on the main screen. I was pleasantly surprised that I can change a playback cursor position in the recording during the playback, which can be convenient option when listening to a large file.

When recording — easy to read timer indicates the time since the recording started. Unfortunately screen turns off after a few seconds and to see the timer again I had to switch the phone back which produced quite a lot of noise in the recording. Option to prevent device from sleeping would be a good to have.

There is no any indicator of the recording level which might be also useful to have. For normal dictation though, when the phone’s microphone is close to the speaker — the recording level is set just right.

Resulting files are quite small — about 100k per 1 minute of audio, but this may depend on quality setting which is configurable from the settings menu.

Voice Activity Detector is worth mentioning again — great feature which skips pauses intelligently while user is not talking. As result recorded speech goes smooth without any long pause so anyone can feel himself a great speaker a bit like Cicero.

I recommend VR+ as one of the best if not the best recorder application in the iPhone App Store. It is intuitive, simple, yet very functional.