I’ve had some odd-looking gadgets cross my desk over the years, but this one has to take the cake. Called a Chumby, it looks more like something you’d buy in a sports shop rather than an electronics store.
The Chumby, which looks a little like a deformed rugby ball, consists of a touch-screen surrounded by soft padding. Figuring out exactly what it is takes some time. In simple terms, the Chumby is an Internet-connected device (it has a Wi-Fi aerial) that delivers information important to you via widgets.
You can keep it anywhere in the house, though I’d imagine a kitchen counter or bedside table are the most practical places for it.
It runs Linux and as such is completely customisable (if you don’t mind hacking code). New widgets can be downloaded from the Chumby website.
I’d describe the Chumby as a kind of bedside clock/radio for the 21st century. You can set it to stream stock-market information, or the latest weather for your region, or pictures of your family, and so on.
The company that makes the Chumby describes it as a way of taking your favourite parts of the Internet and delivering them to you in a “friendly, always-on, always-fresh format. It’s a windows into your Internet life that lives outside your desktop, so content like weather, news, celebrity gossip, podcasts, music, and more has a place away from your world of documents and spreadsheets.”
You can download more than 1 200 widgets. Just set it up once and it will automatically update your chosen widgets via your Wi-Fi connection. I liked the fact that you could randomly stream tweets from Twitter. The ability to stream Internet radio stations is also pretty nifty, if you’re on uncapped broadband.
You can even hook up a separate digital music player to the Chumby and it becomes a pair of speakers, though the quality of the audio leaves a lot to be desired.
The Chumby has a 3,5-inch LCD touch screen, two USB 2.0 ports, a 350MHz ARM processor, 2W stereo speakers, 64MB of flash ROM and a squeeze sensor (squeeze the top of the device to bring up a menu. Software updates are also done over the air, via Wi-Fi.
The device has two USB ports and a 3,5mm audio jack for headphones. On the downside, its touch screen is not particularly responsive. Also, it has to be plugged into the mains as it doesn’t have an internal battery.
It’s a weird device, to be sure, and I’d be hard pressed to justify stumping up the more than three grand it’ll cost to import it from the US. But its hackability will no doubt give this device geek cred. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral
- Review unit supplied by WantItAll
- See Fox News’s take on the device in the video below