Apparently Edirol are bringing out a new solid state recorder: the R-09. It’s being released in late April for shipping in early May. Rumour has it that they’ve fixed the problems associated with the R-1, such as really low built-in preamp, and they’ve improved the built-in mic as well. It takes SD cards. I have to wonder what other issues they’ve introduced, though. There must be a reason that so many other recorders are flash-based rather than SD-based. And is there any other recorder which has ‘reverb’ as one of the 3 buttons on the front?
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Anggarrgoon 
That sounds interesting! I bought the R-1 a couple of months ago. I haven’t tested it in a real field environment so far, but a grad student of mine has taken it with her and I will see what she thinks about it. It seems that we need another recorder for the department anyway and I can order the R-09 instead, but if it takes SD cards instead of flash cards that is inconvenient, because we need more cards of a different type. The main problem about the R-1 that I see is that battery life is so short. And it doesn’t look nice, but that’s a minor point.
The battery life is supposedly several hours with good batteries (how long is your student getting? Is she using alkaline batteries?) There are issues with the recording level. Robert and I tested one and the levels were really low, ok for the one-on-one recording I tend to do (when you can mic an individual speaker) but hopeless for conversational recording.