I first have to say that this looks and feels just like a gadget and toy. In some way's it is, but it's a whole lot more. It has a lot of practical uses and I'm sure a many more will come along. When I opened up the box I just plugged it in and followed the onscreen instructions. I'll admit, I read the very minimum to get it working. One it was up and running I very easily customized all the widgets to my needs. It's fairly straight forward with a basic control panel. The control panel could do with a little tweaking to make it more practical. A good example would be that they have included a "night" button that just turns the night clock on, which is great. In some cases I would like to just see a clock during the day and there's no shortcut to that. There is a work around! Just make a channel with one widget, a day clock. That being said it's a great device. I loaded on news sites, some video streaming sites and best of all I loaded on orb.com to stream internet radio stations. ORB.com software let me listen to radio stations from around the world. The list at ORB was fairly limited BUT you can add your own custom streams. As I'm from Australia and live in the USA I wanted to listen to Australian radio stations beside my bed. I easily went in and added 10 custom radio stations from Australia to my portal on the ORB website. Within a minute of 2 they were all on the screen of my Chumby streaming live radio from Australia. Using ORB I managed to stream video from Australia as well. This was very limited but it worked fairly well. So you know what's available here are some of the widgets that I loaded on my Chumby: EBAY, ORB Radio and TV, EarthCam, 12 Hour Flip Clock, The Weather Channel, SMH News, Regional Weather Radar, ABC News, Google Email, Notes, EMAIL Viewer, GPS-PLT.
Here's a summary of Pro's and Cons that I found.
Pro's:
- Very quick delivery from Chumby
- Easy to use right out of the box. No need to read instructions.
- Easy to update from the Chumby website to your Chumby
- WIFI was very easy to set up. It worked with WEP,WPA and MAC filtering
- The touch screen works well.
- It has many custom widgets you can add to personalize your Chumby with, whether it be a bed side chumby or one of your desk.
- Internet radio and TV from ORB is great.
- Pandora Radio works really well.
- Streaming your own music via USB works well
- Viewing my personal photos was easy. Just like a digital Picture frame.
- Video, Photo and Audio were all very clear.
- Setting up separate channels made it easy to group certain widgets
Con's:
- Control panel needs a little improvement
- The volume control is a little too deep in the menus sometimes.
- The volume itself seemed a little low BUT it was more than likely the site source and not the Chumby.
- Some Widgets (This isn't the Chumby itself) could do with a few more buttons to control content.
- We need more Widgets (Not directly a Chumby issue)
In all this is a great device. I can't wait to see what new Widgets are released. The Pro's far out way the Con's so that's why I gave it a 4/5. It's a little quirky but over all I love the little thing. I can see the Chumby being the next craze. I will write another review after I load the new beta software and use it for the next few weeks.
