Chumby One Hands On Review – A Must Buy For all Gadget Freaks!

Posted by Abbas || November 18, 2009 || (No Ratings Yet)  Loading ...

I started using Chumby One last week and I’ve completely falling in love with it. It’s a cute little tv-like gadget which sits right next to my laptop and plays endless music or give me access to my tiwtter account, Podcasts, News channels, Photo stream from Flickr, Gmail and of course my favorite, Twistori.

I currently have 26 widgets installed on my Chumby dashboard, however, more ambitious chumby users can choose from 100’s of widgets. One of the advantages Chumby has is its active community which is eager to contribute in from of new Widgets.

One of the best examples of how the team is working towards keeping the community active is a new widget released today for Google Voice. Once installed, this plugin automatically fetches and plays voice mails saved in your Google voice profile. Widget idea was submitted by a user and the plugin was delivered by the developer team in a month’s time and it works like a charm.

I did not get a chance to use Chumby classic so I have no point of reference but for a $100 price tag Chumby One is a darn good gadget. Though I received Chumby One as a review unit, but even if I had to buy one I wouldn’t  mind spending money on a gadget like this.

Chumby Pictures:

Chumby is good for running applications like Pandora, Twitter, Stock Quotes, Facebook Feeds, etc.. which endlessly run in the background on the computer and eat up valuable memory.

Once you get a Chumby, visit Chumby.com to register and activate the device. This is where most of the management happens. Widgets can be installed, uninstalled or configured from your account on Chumby.com. Once changes are made to the dashboard on Chumby.com it starts reflecting on the gadget within no time.

Users can also send Widgets to eachother by adding a chumby username(chum) to their friends list. Chums also have the option of embedding their Chumby on a Webpage, Virtual Chumby.

Below is my virtual chumby

Following screenshots what Chumby Dashboard looks like..

How can it get better? I’ve noticed a few things which in my opinion will improve the user experience of Chumby.

Multi-Task: The platform should be capable of running multiple applications or widgets at the same time. I don’t want to see Pandora on my screen at all time when the songs are playing, I might want to run some other application while the songs are playing in the background.

Volume dial should be multi-purpose: The knob is currently used for volume only. I think it should be put to more use like for scrolling through the list of music channels or through the list of widgets installed on Chumby.

Widget Catalogue: It’s not easy to scroll through the installed widgets when you have quite a few of them installed. I think selecting the widget would be a full screen activity which shows more than 1 installed widget at a time.

Over all I think Chumby One is a wonderful gadget to have. It enables you do to a lot of things without being at your computer or laptop at all times.

Click here to buy Chumby Classic and here for Chumby One.

Watch the following video to see Chumby One Unboxing

Update Received from Chumby: 18th Nov

Multi-Tasking: Listening to music is while using another widget is possible, ain’t that something!!!

“In the “how it can get better” section, you mention multi-tasking. We agree wholeheartedly, and built the system to enable audio while viewing content. From Pandora (in your example), tap the Done button in the lower right corner of the screen, then Done to exit the Music section, then the thumbnail of the current app (above where it says Hide Control Panel) to continue widget/app playback. You’ll be listening to Pandora and viewing your content simultaneously.” – Michael Coleman from Chumby.

Volume Knob Multi-Purpose:  The knob is built to handle more than just the volume. We can expect to see its implementation soon.

“You also mentioned that it would be nice if the volume knob could be used for other purposes. And in fact it can. It’s presented as a “mouse wheel” to Flash and uses standard Flash handlers for that. I’d expect that once the developer community gets its hands on the new devices we’ll see implementations of this.” – Michael Coleman from Chumby.

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