• Science Week: What’s the next gadget that you want to buy?

    To celebrate Science Week bloggers are being invited to talk about the effect that science has had in their lives through a range of topics – each day the organisers will reward the best post with a Nintendo Wii console. This post is one of my entries to the competition.

    “Q2 – What’s the next gadget that you want to buy?”

    There are about a million and one gadgets that I’d love to get my hands on as soon as possible if I could afford it but the next gadget that I need and want to buy has to be the Zoom H4.

    The Zoom H4 is a portable digital audio recording device which I’m looking to invest in for the production of my side-project Dáil30. Without a decent audio recorder the project just isn’t going to take off and that’s not something I want to see happen.

    What’s so attractive about the H4, besides the fact that I can use decent quality external microphones and record at a decent quality on the go, is its storage medium – SD card.

    I’ve just ordered myself a 2GB SD Mini card with an SD adaptor which I plan to use for this device. What that basically means is that I can pop my adapted SD Mini card into the H4 and record an interview; then on the bus journey home I can take the card out of the adaptor, slot it into my Nokia N80 and listen back to see how it sounds; then once I get home I can drop it back into the adaptor and slide it into my laptop’s built-in SD card reader for editing and production. Now if that isn’t some form of convergence, I don’t know what is.