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I’ve first written about chumby over a year ago, and now it’s finally available (although the store is currently invite-only for folks who have pre-registered, which as it happens I have ). chumby is a hackable gadget featuring WiFi, USB-ports, integrated speakers, squeeze- & acceleration-sensors and a 3.5″ LCD-display. users may choose from more than hundred software-widgets which turn a chumby into a YouTube-client, an RSS-reader, a calendar or a Facebook-/Flickr-photoframe. since the product is designed to be open for both software- & hardware-hacks, chumby seems to be the perfect device to waste some time with. and for USD 180,- & free shipping I’m really considering getting one of those…hmm. some things I’ld like to do with chumby:

• monitoring your web-servers’ uptime (a la twittermon)
• remote-control my squeezebox, using the chumby to browse the music/video-library (thinking of the Sonos-remote control)
• use it as a streaming audio-client for online radio or on-demand archives like play.fm

what would you use this gadget for? do you think it’s any good? opinions welcome!

Michael Arrington (among several others) reports from foocamp (the friends-of-o’reilly un-conference held this weekend) about the announcement of chumby, a new wifi-enabled, touchscreen-based information-device. prototypes of chumby were spread among foocamp-attendees, and so far their blogposts give reason for envy

chumby is based on an ARM 266MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, WiFi-adapter and a 3.5″ LCD with 320×240 resolution. it features audio-output, microphone-input, built in speakers and USB-port. user-input can either happen via touchscreen or through the very cool squeeze-sensor (seems like the brown parts of chumbys shell are of soft, squeezabel material). while all this sounds good, the really great part is yet to come: chumby is designed to be open for both software- and hardware-hacks! the device can easily be removed from its shell, encouraging geeks to install chumby in places its creators haven’t dreamed of. on the software-side, developers will be able to code widgets playing music from storage-devices plugged into the USB-port, fetching rss-feeds, displaying images or video etc. - the possibilities seem to be endless. customers will be able to purchase chumby for about USD 150$ in march 2007…the launch-date being the single fact I don’t like about chumby