One of my managers at work is tired of all the pen usage in note taking. He is looking for two things: 1) some type of flash drive media recording device (or perhaps the old style micro cassette recorder is still good enough); 2) software that can transform recorded speech into text to be placed onto the main data PC.

I also forgot to mention to him about mini PCs. My brother uses a note taking PC at work. Expensive thing. But its really to fancy plus he bought it about a year ago. Never-the-less, if anyone can recommend any type of palm top, PDA, note pad PC, pocket PC, or to whatever their official trade name is suppose to be that is specifically designed to easily take notes (and then tranfser to another PC)...please also mention.

Thank you for your help.

If you want a voice recorder, there are many different ones out there. Many of them are available in a digital version that has built in storage. There are also ones that use flash or other similar media. Transferring that to text might be a bit of a problem since speech to text software is still not perfect. When you add the task of translating recorded speech, it gets sketchy.

As far as handhelds, Palm makes one that is very inexpensive, at around $100, called Zire. It lacks many features but it sounds like you only need the ability to write, change to text and transfer to a PC. While the Zire won't do a lot, it will do those things.
http://www.palmone.com/us/products/handhelds/zire/