The reviews are trickling in… Today, Personal Tech Pipeline describe their hand’s on time with the Samsung Helix. They focus on the unit’s ability to record audio programming and come away impressed. The recording and storage abilities don’t interest me nearly as much as having live satellite radio in such a compact (and attractive) form. I’m thinking this will make an excellent companion to my new Forerunner 205 when running along the Potomac, though I may wait until the rebates appear.
For an extensive review of the similar Pioneer model, check out Orbitcast’s Inno coverage. The Inno is still listed as a pre-order and the Helix as coming soon at the XM store.
Personal Tech Pipeline says: The three words that Samsung uses to pitch the Helix — a pocket XM radio receiver and recorder — is “TiVo for radio.” Like most analogies, it’s not quite right. But it’s not all that far off, either. What’s notable about the Helix is its ability to capture XM programming for time-shifted playback. At its simplest, you can set the unit to record a given channel at a given time so you can listen to it during your commute or workout or whatever. More intriguingly, you can record individual songs off the air by pressing a single button. If you don’t catch the beginning of the song, don’t fret: The Helix has a 10-minute buffer, so you can hit the button pretty much anywhere in a song and get the whole thing unless you’re grabbing “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” or a Dave Matthews Band concert. The gotcha here is the same one as TiVo’s; you have to have been tuned to that station in order to use the buffer. If you hop to a new channel and immediately land on something you want to grab in mid-song, you’re out of luck.
What I’d like to see is something like this for terestrial radio. That this thing is for Satellite only (XM at that) rules it out for me.
Many TV tuner cards include FM and I’ve read about software that schedules and records programming. There’s also a PC accessory by Griffin called the radioShark that would give you that functionality. The radio Shark saves audio as AAC files so you can dump them on your iPod and take them on the road!
Since just about everyone (and their mom) is producing podcasts these days, it might be easier to just grab that NPR or ESPN segment through iTunes scheduled downloads. I got a Shuffle off of ebay last week for just that purchase.
What Robert said, only I’d do it one better: I want it for the car! I listen more to talk stations or morning shows and I’d love to be able to catch things I miss due to kid interrupting or getting out for gas. Not to mention being able to pause for conversation about the topic on the air.
It’d have two buttons: pause and jump back 30 secs. After resuming from pause it’d play at a user-selectable (not while driving) 110%-130% speed to catch up to real-time, non-pitch-changing of course!
Yes but the key is to have it in a self contained portable device.
I could record terrestrial radio, transfer it to a DMP and listen to it but it’s nowhere close to a portable radio with a built in DAR (Digital Audio Recorder).
As for podcasts, that also lacks the seamlessness that I want. (Besides I can’t get pas the stupd name :-) )