EccoNote is another run-of-the-mill application with nothing to specifically distinguish it other than its price tag. It works as advertised, although like some of the other applications has the rather inconvenient design of starting from a memo listing screen rather than a recording screen, requiring an extra tap to start a new memo and then begin recording.
One rather odd design choice that makes EccoNote somewhat non-intuitive is its use of the spinning “Please Wait” indicator to show its recording progress. No time counter or level meter is displayed, and it took us a moment to realize that the application was actually recording, and not merely waiting to start recording:
EccoNote also suffers from the same rather annoying limitation of Voice Notes: when you’re finished making a recording, if you tap the “Record” button again, your current recording will be erased without any warning, and a new recording is started. This is counter-intuitive and potentially dangerous, since the Record button is an easy target to hit accidentally as well. In the very least, a warning should be provided to notify a user that he or she is about to lose the current recording.
Other features of EccoNote are somewhat predictable for an app in its class: you can rename memos, but not transfer them off of the iPhone in any way, there is no pause/resume feature nor the ability to append to an existing memo, nor any other kind of organization or categorization. In fact, if you rename a memo, you also lose the date and time stamp, as it is not stored (or at least not displayed) anywhere else in the application.
As with Voice Notes, even for a free price tag we expect a moderately better user interface design out of an app such as this, particularly considering that you can find considerably better options for the price of a cup of drip coffee.