Julie let me play with her Chumby. What’s a Chumby? Well, a Chumby is a little dream machine. A wifi, linux-based widget bean bag with a touch screen and speakers. It is a technology nexus a little ahead of its time. I say ahead of its time because it’s also not quite there yet. Here’s my review: Everyone on the Interaction Design team is aware of the Chumby. We were interested in the possibilities of such a device. But there were a lot of delays getting this thing into the world. The beta nature of the product is showing. It is trying to bridge a lot of technologies to give you what is perhaps just a fancy alarm clock. It has a little button in its plush top, perhaps for hitting the inevitable snooze. The set up is via the chumby web site. You set up a channel of widgets that then cycle. On the chumby itself, you select the channel you want to display and off it goes. First impressions: It’s small. Smaller than I thought and perhaps smaller than it needs to be. It’s screen is tiny. You need to be sitting near it. Also, the power cord. You really want something like this to be rechargeable. A pet you can carry with you, set on your desk maybe. Seeing RSS feeds on a Chumby begins to suggest how cool this could be. It’s cute. It’s helpful. So I poked around in it’s plush pouch and found a connection for a nine-volt. I plugged one in and everything worked fine for a cycle of the channel and then Chumby death. I also noticed that the screen was getting a little warm around the edges. Stuffing a nine volt into a plush little computer is odd enough, but then it getting hot is a bit scary. After powering off and reinserting the power cord, things were running smooth again. USB memory sticks are not sexy sticking out of the back of your Chumby. Neither are the variety of cords. The Chumby has speakers and you can plug an iPod into the USB port on the back. Through the really stripped down music interface, you can shuffle or play a playlist. Sitting with an iPod Nano plugged into the Chumby, starts to beg the question: Why am I jumping through these hoops to get a little iPod boombox with a little touch screen interface that kind of works (my fat fingers were wrestling to make it go). So has Apple already made the Chumby a moot point with its iPod Touch and iPhone? It’s hard to say. If you weigh the benefits of the open architecture and the little speakers, the USB connections, etc. I suppose you could make a case for the Chumby being a worthy accessory. But immediately, I felt like all these cables, the reduced usability of the interface, and the price, make the iPhone or iPod Touch a much cooler offering. Did I mention that the Chumby is $200? Cheaper than an iPhone, sure. But it won’t fit in your pocket. The culture of the Chumby encourages customization. For the tinkerer, it has a lot of interesting possibilities. The Chumby is a cool hack. It is a grab bag of all the things we tech-geeks dream of in a gadget. But for Joe Consumer looking to get his RSS feeds from the back porch while reading a book, you probably want what Apple offers. We’re looking at the developer’s puzzle of implementing widgets for this device and other Flash Lite devices to come (including the iPhone which doesn’t support Flash yet. C’mon Apple and Adobe, hurry it up!). The Chumby site provides a gallery of widgets to choose from if you are not tech-savvy to that degree. Ryan had the bright idea of building little spider legs for the thing so it can run around on its own power. That gets at what these sorts of devices aspire to: a little helper bot. Roomba meet Chumby. [youtube mj4lsNw3IG0]