Blue Microphones Mikey 2 iPod Voice Recorder: review

December 16, 2010 by Bill Palmer

by Bill Palmer

The new Mikey from Blue Microphones is a long time in coming, as it debuted nearly a year ago at CES and has just now come to market. The second generation Mikey, or “Mikey 2″ as we’ve taken to calling it for clarification purposes, is a snap-on voice recorder for iPod. The first Mikey was already easily the best product of its kind, owing mainly to the fact that Blue is an audio company and, generally speaking, its competitors in this space aren’t. As my recent in-house tests have confirmed, the Mikey 2 offers up all the goodness of the original, with a bit more of a streamlined stylistic design and even better audio quality – although not all potential users will be happy.

A year ago, the original Mikey worked with the iPhone models of the day but only in an unofficial capacity: you’d plug it in, your iPhone would warn you that it wasn’t supported, and you could go ahead and use it anyway. But with the rise of the iPhone 4, Apple has changed the iPhone’s internals such that the Mikey is simply not compatible. That explains why the Mikey 2 is clearly marketed as being an iPod voice recorder, with no mention of the word “iPhone” anywhere on the package. For those curious, it also (somewhat predictably) doesn’t work with the iPad.

Judging the based on its own merits, and with products it’s officially compatible with, the new Mikey is easily a step up from the original and is therefore easily the best-sounding, most-recommendable iPod voice recorder on the market, making it a bona fide five star product. Here’s hoping, however, that Blue Microphones can figure out how to work around Apple’s latest iPhone changes with the next Mikey, so that iPhone users can be welcomed back into the fray. As it stands, the Mikey is one of the few instances in which iPod touch users have it better than iPhone users.

rating: five stars out of five • BlueMic.com • buy now: $58 at Amazon.com.