It does have a mic input. It just uses the ear phone for the input. I tried it out yesterady with a home mad lavaliere. Recorded pretty well too except my lav was crap.
After using the new dr-08 for a few days, now I can tell you that to get any useful off camera audio, you'll need to monitor the audio and be able to adjust input gain volumes. A simple recorder will leave you spending hours trying to get the gains correct in post and most likely will leave you with ridiculously hissy or blown out audio.