Chumby brings mobility to your favorite widgets

Posted on April 15, 2007
Filed Under Technology |

ChumbyA group of hackers are going into legit business having developed a device that might just reinvent the alarm clock. The Chumby is a portable device that brings mobility to your favorite online widgets. Widgets are small, highly specialized applications. Chumby is driven by a 266-megaherz processor and has 32 megabytes of flash memory. These specs make the device more than just a highly specialized gadget such as an mp3 player.

Chumby is designed to be fully customizable inside and out. Developers are welcomed to hack the device and create new applications/widgets for it; to that effect, the team has open sourced Chumby’s source code. There are a myriad of widgets for the device and once it goes on sale in the next few months, expect the number of available widgets to explode mostly driven by the open nature of the architecture. There are widgets for basic functionality such as an alarm clock and weather forecasts. But the device’s wi-fi abilities allow it to do much more. You can get widgets that display the value of your favorite stocks, preview your commute on a webcam, download and play mp3 encoded music, get live score updates for your favorite sports and monitor your eBay auctions just to name a few.

Users can interact with the device using a touch screen and this electronics miracle is customizable on the outside just as on the inside. The Chumby’s squeezable, soft suede casing is fully customizable to your needs and desires. Chumby’s creators welcome any hacks to its exterior as much as its interior.

You can’t buy Chumby yet, but its creators expect it to be on the market in early summer 2007. In the meantime, a number of Chumby’s have been made available to early alpha testers so you know the device is real and it won’t be long before it is enhancing everyone’s life. Or at least, the lives of those who want to pay $150 to buy one.

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