“I am looking for an MP3 player with good voice recording feature since I need it to record lectures in the college… I want it to be able to record low and somewhat distant voices… Any ideas?”
If voice recording is important and you want the best quality audio then I would check out Zoom H2 Handy Portable Stereo Recorder. The Zoom has 4 microphones for 360 degree recording so you can be sitting anywhere and still get great audio quality.
Cowon iAudio 7 is very highly rated mp3 player that comes with a built in microphone and has awesome battery life (up to 60 hours) for those long lectures. There’s also a setting which allows you to adjust the quality output which goes up to WMA-formatted 128Kbps.
Many iPods have third party microphones you can attach to an iPod and use for recording. For example you can get a iPod (5gen) and get yourself a add-on recorder from Belkin like this one.