Chumby humbly set to charm Aussie owners - Update 1

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 12 November 2008 09:12

Your IT - Entertainment

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.

Internode's already taken advantage of the Flash capability: "We've developed our own widget that allows you to read news and network advisories, and we plan to offer various new customer service tools in this way as well," said Richard Burke, content and communications coordinator for the company's content services group.

"Chumby can play streaming audio from around the Internet, and we are working with Chumby Industries to provide convenient access to the Internode unmetered streaming radio station service in the near future," he added.

Due to "technical limitations" chumby's Internet radio feature is currently limited to 25 streams, but you can add stations to your personal playlist, Burke explained. The one downside is that some of the 25 default streams are only available to Internode customers.

"Through working with the guys at Chumby Industries, we hope to overcome these limitations and one day release the full list of unmetered stations to our customers," he said.

One slightly unfortunate feature is that although chumby is a wireless device, it does need to be plugged into the mains to operate. But that's probably better than a battery-operated unit that can't go very long between charges.

Apart from that, it's hard to argue with Burke's assertion that "Chumby provides the perfect Christmas gift for anyone who wants their favourite Internet content at their side, without being stuck behind a keyboard", unless you insist on taking "anyone" too literally.

Although chumby is only just going on sale in Australia, it's been out in the US for some time. Following a beta program - the Insiders Launch - in late 2007, it went on general sale in February this year. There's certainly an enthusiastic user community around the product.

The idea of having easy access to resources such as weather reports, photos and audio streams anywhere in the house (I'm sure that somewhere there's a chumby that lives in a bathroom) is very attractive. You don't always want to bother with a computer, or even a mobile Internet device such as an iPhone. Like a clock or a thermometer, some stuff should simply be there when you glance at the device.

If the name chumby seems vaguely familiar, you just might be thinking of the Chumblies, a variety of robot that appeared in the 1965 Doctor Who story 'Galaxy 4'.

If you haven't already seen it, you probably won't get another chance because the Galaxy 4 story is among the lost episodes.

But there's nothing stopping you from getting a chumby as long as you can find $A299!