Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar Feverish Velocity

To Chumby or Not To Chumby

Dear Andre,

Don’t buy a Chumby yet. They are great, cute little devices that make you want to squeeze them and poke them and love them. Installing and configuring widgets is an extremely simple and transparent process. And there are lots and lots of widgets.

And there lays the problem. I think the official Chumby blog says it best:

There are a bunch of widgets for you now: some are really well done, fun and interesting; others aren’t very good or just not my cup of tea. That’s “user-generated content” for you.

I would be happy if the Flickr module was able to show a stream of photos from my friends, but it can’t - it pulls an annoyingly random assortment of my own photos. I would love it if my Chumby could show me upcoming events on my calendars, but it can’t - it shows events that have already happened! All of the widgets I have installed suffer from this problem - they’re only 30% there. And for some strange reason, the Chumby folks have not released very many of their own applications, so you’re stuck trying to find fun third party widgets that actually do something that makes it worth having a $200 linux pillow. And they just aren’t there yet.

I think that in six months or a year, the Chumby will be totally awesome. I think that when more people get them and more developers catch the bug for creating fun applications for the device, it’ll be a great platform. But right now, its a cute pillow that does nothing but suck power and take up space on my coffee table.

(Still interested? There are some interesting comments from the internet’s Matt Haughey here on my Flickr stream.)

This whole time I thought you were talking about a chubby.