My Chumby Has Arrived!

My birthday is this month, but my present came early: today, I got a chumby! It’s the sort of thing that it’s hard to justify to buy for yourself, but extremely cool to receive as a gift. If you haven’t heard, chumby is a new (and may I say, awesome) compact device that displays useful and entertaining information from the web. On your chumby you can get news, photos, music, celebrity gossip, weather, box scores, blogs, and more by using your wireless internet connection. Like they say, chumby is “just pure 24/7 gratification to be able to have the Internet on tap.”

To use chumby, you plug it in and connect it to your wireless network. From chumby.com you can configure playlists of “widgets” to display on the device. Widgets can be anything…RSS feeds, web clips, animations, games, videos, etc. My “default” channel has Tampa’s weather from the Weather Channel, a Facebook widget, Twitter updates, a clock (from Cute Overload), and news from Engadget & TechCrunch. (Oh, and LOLCats…sorry, couldn’t resist). I also made a games channel, a flickr photos channel, and a “feeds” channel featuring content like Digg news, CNet content, Wired, GigaOM, and more.

The chumby also has speakers, so you can connect your iPod to your chumby using the iPod’s USB connector and play your iPod playlists on the chumby.

Even better than all this, chumby is totally customizable! For starters, chumby comes with charms you can hang from the side to personalize it. But even better, the chumby is completely hackable. You can thoroughly customize your chumby in one of four ways: hardware, software, flash, or crafts. The hardware is hackable, developers can write software for the open-source, Linux-based platform, and Flash developers can code for it as well. You can even customize the outside - the chumby is designed in such a way the insides can be easily removed from the leather casing so you can make it look the way you want. (See some customized chumbys here).

Each chumby device has the following:

wi-fi connectivity • access to the free chumby Network • 3.5″ LCD color touchscreen • two external USB 2.0 full-speed ports • 350 MHz ARM processor • 64 MB SDRAM • 64 MB NAND flash ROM • stereo 2W speakers • headphone output • squeeze sensor • accelerometer (motion sensor) • leather casing • AC adapter included

This chumby was an “insider’s release” chumby. I signed up for the “Insider’s Release” list a while ago, then forwarded the invite info & login information to Joel along with a “hint, hint - birthday idea” note. The holidays are almost here, I suggest you do the same. Chumby is under $200, so you won’t break the bank.

And wow, it sure is fun!

*Mine’s black but the widget only comes in tan!