Get a Chumby!

What is a Chumby? It's a really small networked computer that looks like nothing else you've seen. It looks good, runs Linux, can be extended/customized and you can make Flash Lite 2 apps for it.

(photo by Dylan Field) UPDATE: We've emailed the Chumby PR department 3 times for a review model, but apparently they don't want Flash developers to learn about their platform? They actually don't even care to reply to our emails, so don't expect a review anytime soon... (Jan 2008)

Want to wake up to your favourite tunes? How about keeping track of your stock portfolio while fixing the car? Ever wanted to stick a computer somewhere in the kitchen? The Chumby is a small computer with a touch sensitive screen and WiFi connection. It has a customizable outer shell so you can not only customize the software, but also the looks of the device itself to make it fit in anywhere. It's also cheap enough to buy "just for experimenting" -$150 is the target price. The Chumby will not be ready for sale until march 2007, but the company has some prototypes that they offer to developers with a good excuse for getting one.

The Chumby is powerful enough for many tasks, but displaying video is probably asking too much. The device has a 266MHz ARM CPU, 32Mb SDRAM, 64Mb Flash RAM, a 320×240 3.5 inch touch LCD screen, two watt speakers, audio output, microphone input functionality and 2 USB port. It also has a squeeze sensor that can be used for various purposes. The whole idea is that the developers encourage hacking the device, both in hardware and software. Any Flash Lite 2.0 file should run fine, only limited only by the computing power.

The Chumby web server has been swamped with requests after several bloggers attended Foo Camp in Sebastopol, California so if you cannot access their pages, check out the article on Techcrunch instead.


Visit Chumby.com to read more

 

 

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