I’m pretty sure that mine is the first hands-on review of the Samsung Helix, a combination MP3 player and portable XM Radio receiver. The thing’s not on sale until the end of May, but Samsung made an early production unit available for testing.

Look at the full review, but the short version is that it doesn’t suck at all. The ability to record and time-shift XM content is pretty cool. But There are two major flaws:

• First, the thing is tied to Napster and is DRMed up the wazoo. Except for the stuff you rip yourself, you’re renting the music for as long as you subscribe to Napster or XM.
• Second, XM reception remains kind of dicey. Granted that Brooklyn doesn’t give the non-stop view of the south sky that XM really wants, but I don’t think a lot of places (like office buildings) do. XM, when all is said and done, is radio — and radio reception does tend to drop out.
• Oh. There’s a third thing. The Helix is Mac-unfriendly. You can’t even authorize an XM radio on a Mac, and Napster is tied to WMAs. Macs need not apply.

Got a PC that’s running Windows 98? Starting in July, you may have a problem.
Andy Patrizio, at internetnews.com, reports that Microsoft will stop supporting Win98 in early July. They’ve threatened that before but this time, with Windows Vista on the horizon after the New Year (honest!), the threat sounds credible. No patches, no security updates, nothing.
Trouble is, upgrading a Win98 box to Vista may not be possible. Vista requires a fairly up-to-date processor and at least 1GB of RAM — specs that a Win98 computer is unlikely to meet. Windows XP may be a solution because its hardware requirements are less rigorous, but it’s not clear how available Microsoft will make XP once Vista gets established. (On the other hand, it might take a good three years for Vista to take hold.)
I’ve got a couple of Win98 machines still running, and it seems I’m not alone:

Power users may sneer at the thought of using the rickety Windows 9x code base, but Jupiter Research has found that one in four homes with more than one PC is running the old operating system, usually on a hand-me-down PC for the kids.

Those machines are usually on the Net. An Internet box with an OS that won’t get any more security patches? Not a smart thing to run. Expect a lot of people to do it anyway, so I bet we’ll see an uptick in zombie spam this summer.
So Microsoft is forcing a march to new hardware and new software. Gee. If you’re replacing your computer anyway for one with a new operating system, maybe you should look hard at a getting a Mac. It’ll run Windows, too, you know — if you have to.

About 100,000 Disney-branded portable DVD players are being recalled because their batteries have a tendency to explode — which somewhat detracts from the user experience.

There’s a programmer named John Gruber who’s got a Mac-related blog called Daring Fireball. He doesn’t blog often but his analysis when he gets around to it is always worth reading.
He recently wrote at some length about Apple’s release of its Boot Camp software, which allows the newest Macs to boot Windows XP and Vista. Not the tech stuff — Gruber doesn’t write about technology as such — but the underlying strategy of letting Macs run Windows.
His points:

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If you discover that you can’t reach big chunks of the Internet today, it’s not your fault or your ISP’s. Network Solutions appears to be down.

NetSol is the company that administers the .com piece of the net, and is far and away the largest domain name registrar on the Internet. For many years, it was the only place to go to buy a domain name. It’s fair, even now, to call it one of the Internet’s cornerstones. In a lot of cases, people who buy (OK, rent) domain names, just let NetSol handle the technology that translates a people-language domain name (like www.danrosenbaum.com) into the numeric name that the Net itself actually uses.

But when NetSol goes down, all the sites that use that service become unreachable. This is one reason that Network Solutions really really really really is not supposed to crash. Which it has. Bummer.

Fortunately, even though I use NetSol as my domain registrar (old habits are hard to break), my domain name service happens elsewhere. Whew.

 [Update: NetSol came back a couple of hours later. As Fred Allen once said, "There’s nothing wrong with putting all your eggs in one basket. Just watch that basket!]

A lot of people have forgotten about Adam Osborne, which is a shame because he’s one of the most important people in the history of computerdom.

He didn’t make the first portable PC; that came from Kaypro. But there was something completely sexy about the Osborne 1, a CP/M-based machine that looked like a Korean War-era radio crammed into a sewing machine enclosure. The Osborne came with a complete suite of software from WordStar, and the computer’s tiny screen wasn’t even wide enough to display a full-width document.

But for less than $2000, it was a real honest-to-god computer that could actually do things, a true geek lust object. And what’s more, you could take it with you. Good lord, I spent a lot of time at my local Prodigy computer store in the early 80s, trying to imagine how I could possibly scrape together the money on my pitiful UPI salary.

The company grew like a dot-com, until Adam made one titanic error: he announced an IBM compatible model, but it didn’t ship for months. Sales of the old model instantly dropped to near zero, and his company just vanished.

Osborne — a columnist, book publisher, computer entrepreneur, software publisher — was a wild man in an industry that badly needed them at the time. He faded from the scene in the late 80s, and the word was that he fell quite ill. Adam passed away the other day in India.