Chumby humbly set to charm Aussie owners

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 11 November 2008 12:21

Your IT - Entertainment

Widgets have proved their worth in web pages and as standalone mini-applications. But that if you could completely free your favourite widgets from the computer?

Imagine a gadget resembling a small-ish digital photo frame but capable of displaying widgets, and you have the chumby, which goes on sale in Australia today through Internode.

This Wi-Fi device has a 3.5 inch, 320 by 240 pixel colour touchscreen used to display a set of widgets selected from a range offered on the chumby web site.

That range includes news and entertainment, Internet radio and podcasts (via Pandora, Shoutcast, Mediafly and other services), photo sharing (Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, etc), social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc), games (including some that take advantage of the chumby's motion sensor), weather reports, video clips, eBay auctions, clocks, and messaging.

So whether you're inclined to the serious or the silly, there's a decent chance that your chumby will be able to serve up something to suit your mood.

To get an idea of what the device is like to use, David Pogue's report for CNBC is available on YouTube. It's a bizarre piece of television, but it does give the flavour of life with a chumby.

If you know how to use Flash, you can create your own chumby widgets. There's an established chumby community that hangs out at the Chumbysphere forum to help with programming - or hardware hacking, if that's more your thing.