Home > Science and Technology > It’s a pillow! It’s an alarm clock! It’s a… chumby?

It’s a pillow! It’s an alarm clock! It’s a… chumby?

Matt Hewitt,
Grand Central Magazine

The chumby is useful for viewing a variety of information people want first thing in the morning and have to flip their computer on to get. The chumby is always on, always connected via Wi-Fi and always displaying the content that you have chosen. Photograph by Matt Hewitt
(Click here for more images.)

The chumby is useful for viewing a variety of information people want first thing in the morning and have to flip their computer on to get. The chumby is always on, always connected via Wi-Fi and always displaying the content that you have chosen.

The Good:

It can play your music or stream music from the internet:

The chumby allows you to listen to music off many different Internet radio stations. The chumby also has two USB ports, allowing you to plug in a flash drive or iPod to access your personal music collection. The chumby features two decent sounding speakers that can get quite loud.

It can wake you up in the morning and show you news, e-mail and calendar appointments

The alarm clock is quite nice, allowing you to set different alarms for different days. It also allows you to select different sources for the alarm. An alarm will play music from a flash drive or iPod, as well as various Internet radio stations. The alarm will also allow you to choose which channel (a pre-selected series of widgets) to play when the device wakes you up.

Self-updating

The chumby updates itself via Wi-Fi, and functionality can be added through these updates. The development team seems to be releasing updates often, which is a good sign that features will be added and suggestions will be taken into consideration.

Easy to setup

The chumby is easy to setup and connecting it to a Wi-Fi network is simple and straightforward. It can connect over encrypted or unencrypted Wi-Fi.

The Bad

Way too expensive:

I don’t know about you, but to me $179.95 is a lot to pay for something that will be mainly used as an alarm clock. A sub-$100 price point would insure a chumby in every dorm room across America.

Alarm is limited

There is no way to make the alarm get gradually louder, so you run the risk of setting it so low that you sleep through it or so loud it startles you when it goes off.

Touch screen has glitches

The touch screen’s tracking is off. Sometimes it takes multiple taps to go through menus and select options, even with a stylus. Whether this is a result of cheap parts or buggy software is unknown. Hopefully this can be fixed with a software update.

Photograph by chumby.com
(Click here for more images.)

Useless widgets

Although there are over 500 widgets that can be displayed, the majority of them are not very useful. It would be nice to see more e-mail, and RSS feed style widgets. I imagine most people using this as an alternative to turning on their computer in the morning.

Most viewers only work with Gmail

Google has its own calendar viewing widget as well as e-mail viewing widgets. It’s too bad other services such as Yahoo! and Windows Live Hotmail aren’t included as well.

Excess advertising

Chumby reserves the right to display ads on the device as part of the end user license agreement. This helps offset the cost of providing the “chumby network” to users. I have yet to see an ad but given the cost of the device, I think ads may be a bit of overkill.

Does many things, none of them well

The chumby tries to do too much and unfortunately does none of it amazingly well. Maybe future updates will add functionality and features to its core uses mentioned above.

Not portable

Because of the heavy power requirements of Wi-Fi, the device must be plugged into the wall, which limits what can be done wit it. It would be nice if you could carry the device around the house with you without having to plug it in and wait for it to restart every time.