Chumby humbly set to charm Aussie owners - Update 1

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 12 November 2008 09:12

Your IT - Entertainment

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

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.

But don't worry if you're with another ISP, chumby will in most respects work just as well, bandwidth permitting.

The 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.

Want a custom widget? Please read on to find out which technology is used.