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There is a work around. A good example would be that they have included a "night" button that just turns the night clock on, which is great. - Easy to update from the Chumby website to your Chumby - WIFI was very easy to set up. Using ORB I managed to stream video from Australia as well. The control panel could do with a little tweaking to make it more practical. - The volume itself seemed a little low BUT it was more than likely the site source and not the Chumby.
- Internet radio and TV from ORB is great. As I'm from Australia and live in the USA I wanted to listen to Australian radio stations beside my bed. It worked with WEP,WPA and MAC filtering - The touch screen works well. In some cases I would like to just see a clock during the day and there's no shortcut to that. When I opened up the box I just plugged it in and followed the onscreen instructions. - We need more Widgets (Not directly a Chumby issue)In all this is a great device. The list at ORB was fairly limited BUT you can add your own custom streams. - 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.
No need to read instructions. I first have to say that this looks and feels just like a gadget and toy. One it was up and running I very easily customized all the widgets to my needs. Within a minute of 2 they were all on the screen of my Chumby streaming live radio from Australia.
- Streaming your own music via USB works well - Viewing my personal photos was easy. I loaded on news sites, some video streaming sites and best of all I loaded on orb.com to stream internet radio stations. Just make a channel with one widget, a day clock. The Pro's far out way the Con's so that's why I gave it a 4/5.
That being said it's a great device. I'll admit, I read the very minimum to get it working. Pro's: - Very quick delivery from Chumby - Easy to use right out of the box. It has a lot of practical uses and I'm sure a many more will come along. - Pandora Radio works really well. ORB.com software let me listen to radio stations from around the world.
It's a little quirky but over all I love the little thing. - 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. In some way's it is, but it's a whole lot more. - Video, Photo and Audio were all very clear. Just like a digital Picture frame. Here's a summary of Pro's and Cons that I found.
I can see the Chumby being the next craze. 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. It's fairly straight forward with a basic control panel. I can't wait to see what new Widgets are released. I easily went in and added 10 custom radio stations from Australia to my portal on the ORB website. This was very limited but it worked fairly well.
- Some Widgets (This isn't the Chumby itself) could do with a few more buttons to control content. I will write another review after I load the new beta software and use it for the next few weeks.
I bought Chumby as a clock-radio that plays Internet music and it does that very well. Its ability to wake me up, entertain me with music and my friend's Facebook photos and then sound another alarm when I'm running late is exactly what I bought it for and that's exactly what it does.
Unlike the other reviewers, I'm extremely happy with my Chumby purchase. I would describe it as a digital photo frame on steroids and LSD. I can see my pictures on Picasa, and Picwing, the photos of all my friends on Facebook, my own or family members Facebook pages, webcams of my city and other favorite cities, a webcam inside Shamu's tank at Seaworld (awesome), as well as my eBay watch lists and various news and entertainment sources in print and video. It has web radio (good speakers)which works great, too.
It does what it says it does, but unfortunately, that's too little. It's wireless - great - but it's tethered to an a/c cord. Screen's too small to read even the headlines without squinting at them. It does play internet radio, like Pandora, very well but it's got to do better than being a one-trick pony.
While the concept of the Chumby has a lot of potential, I don't think it is well executed. It is poorly designed and clumsy.-It sometimes just does whatever it wants. I honestly believe that something like an iPhone is 100x the device, with a far better touch screen, better alarm capabilities and far more functionality. I was also expecting something I could play with before I go to bed, or when I wake up in the morning. I get the impression that the intent is not to offer everything and the kitchen sink, but to provide a minimalist, yet useful set of features. Unfortunately, it does a poor job at both.These are the things that fail:-The screen is not the best quality, making "night mode" either too bright or too difficult to see.-The touch aspect of the screen is very poor. I was expecting something attractive that I could put on my night stand to replace my alarm clock. You could be viewing a widget and it will just change widgets, even if you have a widget "pinned".I'm not at all happy with my Chumby.
When comparing it to any other touch device, it fails.-The accelerometer can be frustrating and eventually does whatever it wants and not what you want.-The content does not appear to be well regulated. It is mostly poor in quality, lacks content updates and is rarely useful.-The screen gets hot, which is uncomfortable when touching it.-The interface just sucks. With so many feature-rich PMPs on the market, I can't imagine why a device as anemic as the Chumby exists. Not only does Chumby miss at it's most basic premise, but there is no reason that higher quality components and more features could not exist at the current price point.
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