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David Pogue Gushes Over the Chumby
stoolpigeon writes "IHT is running a David Pogue review of the Chumby. The Chumby is a small computer embedded in a soft case. The Chumby hardware and OS are open, and the review mentions that the device already has a large developer following, cranking out new widgets for owners. Pogue is obviously quite taken with the Chumby and gives a good introduction to a device that may be the inspiration for a new generation of hackers."
really doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You may remember on of Bunnie Huang's previous exploits - he's the guy who hacked the XBox. He's a hardware-hacking demi-god and has a fantastic blog for electronics geeks. You can read all about getting the Chumby manufactured in China, as well as other topics.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
It looks to me to be just as useful as widgets in Mac/Windows/Linux -- nice enough that I toyed around with them and decided they were unnecessary.
The biggest problem, in my mind, is that it's showing one widget at a time. Looking at it to find out the information you want is, by design, not convenient. You have to make it a point to watch the thing to see the widget you want to see. Sidebars on computers at least have that going for them.
The clock widgets seem especially worthless -- if you have a lot of widgets in your rotation and just missed the clock, you're going to end up wondering what time it was when you started watching, waiting for the clock. (If you go to Walmart, you can get a nifty device that does a better job of telling you what time it is for $5.)
Honestly, dedicated devices for pretty much everything I've heard of the Chumby doing already exist, do a better job, and you could have one of each of them for about what the Chumby costs.
Whale
It's got a reasonable CPU, accelerometer, 2(!) USB ports, wifi, touch screen, runs an acceptable linux environment, and hacking is encouraged. Here's to hoping Pogues + /.'s coverage turns a few more folks on to it.
Out of the box, it's still kinda .9 software - I'd hoped to use it as a smart clock-radio, but the software UI just isn't as easy as a dedicated alarm clock. The good news is, someone with decent skeelz could write an excellent replacement alarm clock.
It should be noted that you can create a "virtual chumby" on the company's site to preview all the widgets 'live'.
And I have to say its one of those impulse tech purchases I've regretted.
Its mediocre at a lot of things and not good at anything.
The alarm clock is awful, there's no timed dimming of the screen, its a massive bandwidth hog (because it has no local storage and it always redownloading things).
The streaming music is cool, but its not as good at it as a dedicated streaming music receiver.
It makes a lousy photo frame -- the colors are bad on the display and it has no local caching so its always redownloading everything.
Maybe it'll be better in the future, but honestly its sort of a waste of money right now.
I had a dell Axim - windows mobile crashed at least weekly with anything more than the default software - reseting to default in the process, and I waited patiently for over a year for the linux drivers to enable wifi on it before giving up. I have a chumby and am happy with it - it makes a cool clock, wakes me up to MPR, flashes the weather, my google calendar, and hopefully at some point lots more (RSS feed to my online to-do list). Hopefully I'll never again live somewhere that I'd have to worry about checking on traffic before I get up, but it can do that, too. I'd like to program it to tie into a home automation system, so when I hit 'snooze' it brings up the lights (if it's dark) and turns on the heater in the bathroom (if it's cold), and has a screen to monitor and control the lights and thermostat manually - it's a few places down on my 'todo' list. The resolution is pretty bad for photos, and the field of view isn't great - especially vertically, for some reason - but I still think it's great as a 'bedside computer', and love the fact that it's 'open' and has only begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with it.
I also have a Chumby, and one thing going for this device is that it has a high WAF (or Wife Acceptance Factor, for you single people) if you set it up right. Ours is a clock part of the time, a photo frame, gets facebook and twitter updates so she can see what the family and friends are up to, panda cam & LOL cats for the kids, traffic update, two news feeds (NY times, CBS), a 5 day weather forecast, and a netflix queue widget. For a stay-at-home mom with two little kids, this is a great way to find out what's going on with the rest of the world that doesn't involve turning on the TV or sitting down at the computer.