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The product page for the Sony Dash does not really shed any more light on what it is, but the pictures indicate it is a clunky tablet-like device which you can be stood on a table against a backdrop of different home furnishings, mostly in soft focus.

A Sony press release from 2010 says that:

Sony today announced that its new Dash, a Wi-Fi touch screen device that pushes real-time, personalized Internet content to users in their homes or offices ... Featuring a 7-inch color touch screen, Dash uses your existing wireless internet connection to provide a continuous display of your selections from over 1,000 free apps, many provided by chumby industries ...

Apparently "Chumby Industries" is a service provider for this sort of device which, according to its own website, had "year-long hiatus sometime relatively recently.

So it looks as if those who stuck with the device, despite an apparent year-long absence of some of the services, suffered a bug at some point which prevented them from using it, and that Sony has released a patch to fix it.

Buy a Chumy, either the Chumby8 or the Sony Dash. http://www.chumby.com/

This is news?
ChumbySpy and SurveillanceSaver have been around for years.

http://www.chumby.com/guide/widget/ChumbySpy

I for one welcome our new Chumby overlords.

http://www.chumby.com/

For those who want to live a little more dangerously, you should try Shenzhen, right beside Hong Kong. It's the new Akihabara and all the new bleeding edge mix & match gadgets the rest of the world hasn't seen before is there. It's now also the electronics manufacturing hub of the world since Everything now's made in China :)

Check these sites out for some of the goodies:
http://shanzai.com
http://micgadget.com
One of the most interesting non-knockoff gadgets to come out of there last month is the Apple Peel, a smart jacket you can slip over an iPod touch that turns it into an iPhone.

Not everything over there is fake knockoffs and Shenzhen China's Shanzhai garage hardware hacking & remixing culture is very interesting.

You should also check out the blog of Andrew "bunnie" Huang, said to be the first guy outside Microsoft to hack the X-Box & wrote the book on it. He co-founded & created the Chumby (open source hackable hardware gadget) and his adventures in Shenzhen are pretty cool.

I wish I had the link to one example: there's one consulting company whose founder methinks writes a blog, the latter often featuring a rather hot, real engineer babe who knows Mandarin, and kicks ass at troubleshooting SMT production issues. My browser history doesn't go that far, otherwise I'd dig it up.

Are you possibly referring to Bunnie's Blog? AFAIK she's an engineer that works for Chumby. She's posted some interesting stuff on manufacturing in Asia, including jaw-dropping videos of high-throughput circuit assembly (by humans, not robots).

This is the best example of prior art I can think of: http://www.chumby.com/guide/widget/Page%20Turner You can flip through the pages, and it's for a touch screen device.

Why can't I buy a frame that simply displays a .RSS on the internet? [snip etc etc etc ]

You want a Chumby. Mine does all that, and you can SSH into it.

Why can't I buy a frame that simply displays a .RSS on the internet?

Get a Chumby. Or if that's too cute, just buy the Chumby guts and put 'em in your own frame. Screen's a bit small, but it's designed (and intended) to be hacked.

In answer to your question - because nobody pays $100 for something that's just a digital picture frame, and if you're selling them for $20, you've gotta have a pay "service" with recurring revenue to make the business plan work. Knocks most of us techies out of the market. And Grandma won't want to deal with setting up RSS feeds, she just wants something that's easy to set up, and she won't notice the $5/month or whatever the fee is.

As of a couple of years ago, 580,000 people still rent their landline phones from AT&T, and have paid upwards of $10,000 over their lifetimes. We're not talking smartphones here, we're talking that old rotary-dial thing from the 50s.

Never underestimate the power of inertia.

Back in the dialup days, I paid the phone company $8/month for an "answering machine service". When I was on dialup, it was nice to have all incoming calls routed to voicemail. On broadband, no need to pay $8/month for the rest of my life when a $5 surplus answering machine would have done just as well at screening out telemarketers. And yet after I switched to DSL, I took three months to get off my ass and cancel the silly $8/month charge. D'oh.

1) Reference design != product 2) Cost of $199 is based on Freescale's projected cost of components, meaning actual cost to consumers would be higher (probably closer to the rumored $300 iSlate price)

chumby one $119.95
https://store.chumby.com/ most of the specs are the same (minus screen of course)

Anyone else reminded of the chumby?

My Chumby disagrees. Qt with Webkit doesn't fit on its internal storage, but its USP is a flash player.

Why not get a Chumby?

http://www.chumby.com/

I like the philosophy behind the Chumby, but if the CrunchPad is cheaper, I'd get that.

The "crypto processor" is simply an ARM7 CPU, and the source code for the firmware running on it is available here

*cough*90%ofthesoftwaremarket*cough* *cough*100%ofthehardwaremarket*cough*

Not quite 100%.

Read on!

I've been meaning to re-write the interface on my Chumby for a long time; I even bought the O'Reilly on Actionscript 3 to help me out, but I'm still balking at diving into it. Now I can write my interface in C, which I'm much more comfortable with, and not have to learn anything new!

There are a lot of others, but Chumby does that and a lot more.

You can begin the giggling by looking at this help page entitled "Handling your Chumby". Some highlights include:

How do I clean my chumby?
Why is the squeeze sensor stuck?

I won't post the one about children handling the Chumby, because that would just be over the line.

What does it mean for a thought to be real?

You know what, screw this; I'm not staying in this semantic labyrinth. Make a better one. Give it some cushy pillows, a chumby, and an Apple TV. Make a chocolate cheesecake with a heath bar crust. Bring some playing cards. Maybe, just maybe, I'll stick around a little longer. Until then, you get to remain a lonely fuckin' minotaur.

Meanwhile, Chumby is 100% open source hardware, including both the board and the default daughtercard, under a BSD-like license, along with 90% of its software (I only say 90% because the widget platform runs Adobe Flash, which is the only closed-source component on the entire device).

Costs about the same as Gumstix, plus you get an LCD, speakers and a microphone.

Aren't the benefits of open source, or, generally, hackable hardware very simple to explain?

While there are some nice toys out there, I didn't see SlingBoxes mentioned on most sites. I find it strange that we aren't being forced to get one of those this season.

But my most coveted toy of the season wasn't mentioned at all!
http://www.chumby.com/

I know that these devices are not officially released, but you can still get them, and the software will be updated as soon as it comes out. Given the open design process, I'm surprised no one here has mentioned them yet.

Wired had a great photo gallery of factories and assembly lines in China.

And here is a write-up about someone from Chumby Industries visiting Shenzhen to get their production line up-to-date. It's more about the area than anything about the factory.

PC/104 (4" square) http://tlb.org/ttds-pc104.html
Pico-ITX (3.9" x 2.8") http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2154184680.html
Embedded Ethernet Boards http://www.ethernut.de/en/hardware/index.html
Chumby http://www.chumby.com/

Make magazine (lots of fun stuff) http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/11/the_o pen_source_1.html

Sure, you can open source hardware, but only in a BSD-style way. Chumby is trying to share-alike their hardware design, but that doesn't work as well as GPL for software or CC Share Alike for something like a work of fiction because while a schematic or PCB can be copyrighted, the netlist implied therin cannot be protected. With dense ASICs/SoCs where most of the design complexity is on-die rather than in the connections on the PCB and the registers in the chip are freely documeted, reverse-engineering isn't hard.

Chumby's response to this is (parphrasing) "fine hook stuff up to the chumbilical by looking at the MX.21 reference design and tracing connections and you won't be subject to our hardware license," but I wonder if they'll really be hands-off if an accessory developed without agreeing to their hardware developers' license is commercially successful. They're selling the hardware at slim margins and hoping to make profit on the service.

I really want one. I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it... Can't wait to see what kind of cool things people do with these little laptops.

Why not focus that energy on a Chumby, in the meantime?

Sound like you want a Chumby.
(Saying from the get-go that you want your device to be linux-based is probably a bad
idea, however.)