The original Chumby was a curious, beanbag-esque blob of WiFi connectedness and difficult-to-explain purpose; the new Chumby One, meanwhile, strips away the squishy exterior and drops the price. Currently up for preorder at $99.95, one of the first Chumby One units has dropped onto the desk of jkOnTheRun’s Kevin C. Tofel.
The original chumby – a hacky sack with a WiFi-enabled touchscreen widget engine stuffed inside – perhaps confused more people than it converted, but the company isn’t giving up. Details on the chumby one have emerged, keeping the 3-inch 320 x 240 display but boosting the processor to a 454MHz chip and packing all that into a hard-shelled plastic casing. There’s also a built-in FM radio along with stereo speakers.
chumby’s widget catalog now amounts to over 1,500 apps, including social networking integration, news and weather apps, Pandora and other streaming radio receivers and more.
Logitech still haven’t made the Squeezebox Touch official yet, but unless someone has crafted one out of modelling clay and stuffed a Chumby inside, the touchscreen media streaming device is certainly out there in the wild. The 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen device promises WiFi b/g, ethernet, USB connectivity and an SD card slot, together with streaming content through Logitech’s Squeezebox system, but right now the Touch refuses to do anything other than wait for a software update.
So, the Chumby came out awhile ago. It’s this little box-like device that pulls information off the internet, like weather, news, and sports updates, and then displays them in Flash format in real-time. It was a pretty original idea, and while it may not have been the sharpest looking thing on the block, its functionality was close to making it worth it. Especially if you don’t like alarm clocks, and can’t afford the alternative. But, apparently the hardware wasn’t the top of the pick for many, and so Chumby is moving over onto the software front, hoping to make a name for itself.
Chumby and Broadcom have announced a collaborative effort to put the formers widget platform on internet-connected TVs, using Broadcom-based set-top boxes, DTVs and Blu-ray players. There are currently in excess of 1,000 widgets available for the Chumby, a compact touchscreen WiFi device, and these will now be accessible along the bottom of big-screens too.
Video demonstration after the cut
Current owners of the cute-looking Chumby device will be glad to hear new features are on the way. In fact, the multimedia device will soon be equipped with additional music-listening features.
This clock radio that can connect to the Internet and is wrapped in leather will let you connect to radio stations you create by using the Pandora service. Plus, you can stream music videos by means of the Avot Media’s tool. Additional features include music news from the likes of UsMagazine.com and RollingStone.com.
Chumby has been around for some time now, and the team behind it are keeping their promise to release updated features for the squidgy touchscreen companion. The latest is support for Pandora radio, the streaming online music service that creates custom ’stations’ based on your favorite tracks. Pandora on Chumby allows you to log into you account, listen to existing stations and create new ones, with playback through the integrated speakers.
Beanbag-like internet appliance and general squishy WiFi companion chumby will soon be able to do more than alert you to the weather and bring you the latest 3G iPhone news courtesy of your RSS feeds. In a deal with Canadian games studio Albino Blacksheep, who specialise in Flash animation and gaming, chumby owners will be able to play selected titles from the studio using the touchscreen and accelerometer tilt-sensor interface. Rotating, shaking and prodding chumby will allow gamers to navigate through tunnels, chase a ball and even direct missiles.
For those of you that don’t know about the Chumby, or forget what it does, it was basically a personal assistant that was portable. You could get the weather on it, RSS feeds, all sorts of other good stuff as well.
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