Digital Home Thoughts: Chumby the Uncute and Uncuddly Edition

"The Chumby 8 deserves a beer. As does Chumby Industries. After years of struggling through the growing pains of their beanbag years and an adolescent identity crisis under the Sony Dash and Insignia Infocast brands, both the company and its product have finally reached maturity."

When Chumby first came out, it fascinated me. A low cost computing platform that would let you do all sorts of things through a relatively open platform. It was soft, cuddly and welcoming. Since then, Chumby has gone through several different phases, including a more practical Chumby One, the licensed Sony Dash and so on. It now looks like Chumby wants to capture a larger market with the Chumby 8.

It does remind me of the Dash in some ways, having a more subtle appearance than its earlier incarnations. Fortunately, all the guts of Chumby are still there with customizable applications. It is like a picture frame on steroids. A good step forward, but the Chumby probably faces the same challenge that a lot of net appliances are facing right now, and that is the increasing dominance of smartphones, handhelds and the like. Why use a Chumby when you can use something like an iPod touch that docks into its own speaker?