Here is a little device that if they can be made inexpensively enough very well may be all over our homes in the future. Chumby is best described as a miniature internet browser, just large enough to display a single widget at a time. The size of an alarm clock, you can set it up to an alarm clock, a email monitor, a weather monitor, and MP3 player in fact it can be set up to be just about anything you can do with an internet widget.
Check out this handy creation in Download Squad - Chumby makes alarm clocks so last century:
Every morning, your alarm clock wakes you. Throughout the day, it tells you the time, and maybe plays some static with a little bit of music thrown in. If it's real high tech, maybe it wakes you with tunes from your mp3 player, piped through tinny-sounding speakers.
When it comes down to it, an alarm clock is a lot like a toaster. It's an appliance. It is cold, and impersonal. It has no soul. And it certainly can't do what a Chumby can.
Chumby is an internet gadget disguised as an alarm clock. It's a small, potato shaped computer that plays widgets (small programs). Because "Chumby hacking" is encouraged, users having access to Flash can make widgets for their own use, or make them publicly available on the Chumby website.
We've had a chance to play with a production Chumby for about two months now. We love the little spud, in spite of the fact it wakes us up too early in the morning.
There are currently some killer widgets available for Chumby. When Chumby is "officially" released in early 2008, we expect that Flash programmers will have a field day.
Some of the more useful Chumby widgets include a fully customizable RSS feed reader, as well as pre-programmed feeds for sites like Digg, Slashdot, Slate and Engadget. Mniml Slideshow shows images from Flickr (we recommend Mniml over the Flickr Photo Viewer, which tends to display only the most recent photos). For video junkies, the YouTube and Anime Kiosk widgets are a must. For those social types, keep track of your friends on Facebook and Twitter.
If they haven't already beat me to it, I suggest they put a big button on the top of Chumby that will allow you to rotate through all of your favorites widgets making it a wireless personal information center.
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