CES 09: Chumby partners with Samsung to embrace the digital home
The world's coolest alarm clock is set to assimilate your other household devices.
MTV's "Pimp My Ride" features a team of rev-heads converting a viewer's stock-standard car into a customised beast on wheels, but if you gave them a boring old clock radio you'd get back something like the Chumby.
Chumbies are basically tiny, internet-enabled widget players roughly the size of a tub of margarine tipped on its side. They feature a 3.5 inch LCD touch screen embedded in a plush bean bag-like casing, along with a wifi adapter for connecting to your wireless network. They're perfect for accessing online content such as news bulletins, weather reports, social networking sites, photo galleries, RSS feeds and internet radio stations.
I've had a Chumby for about a year and I've found one of the great uses is as a bedside alarm clock and digital photo frame, although the dearth of Australian widgets is frustrating. This is improving now that Internode is selling Chumbies in Australia, and local widget developers such as ThinkQuick are doing great work developing a local weather widget.
Unfortunately the Chumby's small display means it's not very practical to use as a photo frame in the lounge room. Now Chumby is partnering with Samsung to turn other internet-enabled devices into Chumbies, such as digital photo frames, televisions and "other connected devices".
At CES in Las Vegas, Chumby and Samsung are displaying prototype wifi-enabled digital photo frames which offer access to all Chumby content and services. The frames will also let users view photos and videos, capture and share photos with the frame's embedded camera and then use the touchscreen to drag and drop content to create and share multimedia photo slideshows.
Internode managing director Simon Hackett has already confirmed that such devices are coming to Australia, although it's too early to lock in the Australian pricing or timeline.
The little Chumby has big plans. Resistance is futile.
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