You're Giving Me a Chumby

Popular Science seems to have a fascination with redesigning the Chumby. This is the second Chumby modification I've seen in the magazine in the past year or so and I haven't been reading regularly. I can understand why they would want to make the squishy Chumby box look more hip (and why you would want to convert it to battery power). But is there really even a point to buying a Chumby?

Besides having a name that is both fun to say and vaguely dirty, the Chumby is an always on wireless internet device that will show information that you choose from the web nonstop. You can get news, stock and sports tickers, play your mp3 files and charge your IPod, play digital pictures across the frame, monitor incoming email and use it as an alarm clock. It is designed to be hacked, with open source hardware and easily disassembled components.

For the geeks, the hardware specs are a 350 MHz ARM9 controller, 64 MB of SDRAM, 64 MB of NAND flash ROM, a 320 x240 3.5 inch touchscreen TFT LCD running at 12Hz, stereo 2W speakers, an integrated microphone, audio output, two USB 2.0 ports and integrated WiFi.

I'm not knocking the Chumby for being a pudgy little widget player. My problem lays more in the area of price. The retail price is $179. 95. The 8 GB iPhone- albeit a flawed device of its own- has the ability to access the same information as the Chumby, WiFi, a music/video/picture playback, PDA software, web browser and is a phone. It retails for about $399 (and falling).

Like a forum poster on a tech site said, the Chumby is what clock radios will be in about five years. It isn't a useless product, but I can't see it being worth the money. Wait this one out awhile and you'll be able to get a Chumby for about $50 very soon.

If I'm going to hack something just for the thrill of it, I'm going to make a Roboraptor spit fire.