Chumby (www.chumby.com) the friendly bedside Wi-Fi web2.0 appliance, iPod charger, Pandora streamer, music,video & widget player safely landed at my house today. Whoa! Touch-screen display, stereo speakers & dual USB ports built-in (charge your phone & iPod overnight!). The product marketing guys really though this one through!
You may not know it yet but you absolutely need one! That svelt bedside atomic-crystal world clock-radio/projector with iPod speaker dock that was "oh-so-hip"last year at Sharper Image now look like an abacus compared to an iMac!
Despite the name (which frankly conjures up images of some obese yet cuddly and charming character from Teletubbies), Chumby is not only "fun" to use but an ingenious and awesome feat of HW & Web engineering/interaction.
It may "seem" like a Toy for Teens but it is completely configurable so you can easily setup channels with custom widget collections today for almost any practical business monitoring application: Google Calendars, LinkedIn, Stock Tickers, News, RSS, Blogs/Micro-Blogs.
Of course Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, eBay, Flickr and all the essentials of your social web life can all be accessed in summary form. The widget support out-of-the-box is most excellent and so far everything I have tried so far works flawlessly with simple browser-based configuration. However, this is day 1 so let's see how this all holds up under the scrutiny of daily use.
Extracting Chumby from his/her (it's?) cute pastel packaging complete with charms, you just plug-in the power adapter (shame it doesn't match Chumby's color like Apple!) and Chumby walks you thru a video greeting, basic use and Wi-Fi setup. This initial setup (unlike almost every other Wi-Fi/Network setup) is actually delightfully simple considering how sophisticated the device is-all you need is your network login/password. I added it to my Airport Extreme network in just a couple of minutes-bizarrely way less time than it took to get my MacBook Pro configured!
In depth look at the audio/music/media streaming capabilities to come next when I have had a chance to really put it through its paces...
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