Yesterday I read some news about Chumby, a new WiFi device being released soon, costing $150, and which looks like an alarm clock on steroids. It features a color screen, the ability to run widgets, hackable hardware, and a squishterface (just made that up, to try to describe the squeeze sensor that the soft case uses to provide user input).
The company behind the Chumby actively promotes hacking the product in any way you want, so this could become another Roomba, albeit cooler (yes, I know, the Roomba moves, so what!). I have signed up to try and get an early sample, let’s see if they consider my arguments.
A few words of constructive criticism – when creating an account, the country drop-down list is not in alphabetical order, so you spend quite a bit of time trying to find yours (US users will have it easy, as it is the default). Additionally, once the steps are completed, you are asked to enter the device ID and give it a name, after which you end up staring at a white page with the big black words: “Application error (Rails”. Whatever that means.