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It is called a Chumby. These can be placed on different channels much like TV stations that you can view or radio stations you can listen to. It is an alarm clock, no it is a small computer, no it is an internet radio. I have it sitting by my bedside and have only touched the surface about what this bad boy can do depending on what widgets are added. The touch screen is a bit finiky at times, but not a show stopper. It is a device that lets you download widgets from the internet and view and listen to them on the Chumby. Right now I have installed some weather widgets and some clocks.
Setup took about 15 minutes as the Chumby just has to find your network and off you go to have fun with the Chumby. No wait, It is all of the above plus more. It is true that you can get all of this stuff on the interent with a PC, but it is great to have my own chumby next to me near my bed. It even has 2 USB slots. There are many categories of widgets that are made by the community. There have been some complaints about the control panel and the touch screen, but I think that the control panel is well implemented. The Chumby who I named storm takes some of the best the internet has to offer and it is a cute addition in my house.
The Chumby is cool.I love mine, and use it as an alarm clock and to listen to streaming radio and read RSS feeds when I wake up.Only problem I've noticed is that the "innards" get out of whack with the insertion of the 9vDC batter backup.Oh, and the two USB ports on the back allow me to charge both my iPhone and Kindle without extra power supplies and adapters being plugged in. I know that wasn't Chumby's original plan for those USB ports but they have quickly become my favorite "features". :-)
It's fairly straight forward with a basic control panel. I will write another review after I load the new beta software and use it for the next few weeks. A good example would be that they have included a "night" button that just turns the night clock on, which is great. The control panel could do with a little tweaking to make it more practical. Here's a summary of Pro's and Cons that I found.
That being said it's a great device. So you know what's available here are some of the widgets that I loaded on my Chumby: EBAY, ORB Radio and TV, EarthCam, 12 Hour Flip Clock, The Weather Channel, SMH News, Regional Weather Radar, ABC News, Google Email, Notes, EMAIL Viewer, GPS-PLT. ORB.com software let me listen to radio stations from around the world. It's a little quirky but over all I love the little thing. It has a lot of practical uses and I'm sure a many more will come along.
My Review after 24hrs of use: I first have to say that this looks and feels just like a gadget and toy. I'll admit, I read the very minimum to get it working. Pro's:-Very quick delivery from Chumby-Easy to use right out of the box. This was very limited but it worked fairly well. There is a work around. I easily went in and added 10 custom radio stations from Australia to my portal on the ORB website.
I loaded on news sites, some video streaming sites and best of all I loaded on orb.com to stream internet radio stations. In some cases I would like to just see a clock during the day and there's no shortcut to that. When I opened up the box I just plugged it in and followed the onscreen instructions. Just like a digital Picture frame.-Video, Photo and Audio were all very clear. It worked with WEP,WPA and MAC filtering-The touch screen works well.-It has many custom widgets you can add to personalize your Chumby with, whether it be a bed side chumby or one of your desk. No need to read instructions.-Easy to update from the Chumby website to your Chumby-WIFI was very easy to set up. Just make a channel with one widget, a day clock. As I'm from Australia and live in the USA I wanted to listen to Australian radio stations beside my bed.
-Setting up separate channels made it easy to group certain widgetsCon's:-Control panel needs a little improvement-The volume control is a little too deep in the menus sometimes.-The volume itself seemed a little low BUT it was more than likely the site source and not the Chumby. In some way's it is, but it's a whole lot more. -Streaming your own music via USB works well-Viewing my personal photos was easy. -Internet radio and TV from ORB is great.-Pandora Radio works really well. Using ORB I managed to stream video from Australia as well. -Some Widgets (This isn't the Chumby itself) could do with a few more buttons to control content.In all this is a great device. I can see the Chumby being the next craze. One it was up and running I very easily customized all the widgets to my needs.
The Pro's far out way the Con's so that's why I gave it a 5/5. The list at ORB was fairly limited BUT you can add your own custom streams. Within a minute of 2 they were all on the screen of my Chumby streaming live radio from Australia. I can't wait to see what new Widgets are released.
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