The Price

$US100 for a limited time, $US120 afterwards. Includes international power adaptors and AC charger, but battery is sold separately. Starts shipping November 25 to the US and some countries in Europe.

The Verdict

It’s the same questionably essential yet unquestionably adorable Chumby, with a new case and a lower (and very tempting) price. I have no idea what its makers meant the original beanbag Classic (newly renamed) to be used for, but the One is more than a little reminiscent of old-school clock radios. And if you look at it as simply a badass clock radio, rather than an amorphous connected widget device, you really appreciate it. Imagine waking up to Pandora, then rolling over and checking your email and Twitter before hitting snooze for another 10 minutes of sleep. Awesome, right? But what exactly has changed from the Chumby Classic?

Instead of the touchscreen-in-a-beanbag look, it’s now rocking a smooth white plastic casing with a big honking volume knob on the side and a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen. I really like the design: It’s playful and chunky and thoroughly charming. Some may be bummed that the One loses the beanbag look, which is kind of a signature of the line, but I don’t think it’ll make that much difference. The Classic (beanbag) Chumby required a power cable so it’s not like you could toss it around, and luckily the new design is still distinctive and fun — and if you really want the beanbag, it’s not going anywhere. The One is simply joining the Classic, not replacing it.

The Chumby One does lose a few features found in the Chumby Classic — it only has one USB port compared to the Classic’s two, and the formerly stereo 2W dual-speaker set is now mono speaker with the same wattage. The speaker is noticeably more distorted and muddier, and it could use definitely use improvement, although it’s not horrible and is fine at lower volumes.

But the Chumby One also gains 2GB memory (the Classic has 64MB), a li-ion battery (in addition to AC) and a faster processor. I didn’t notice much improvement in speed, but it’s not like it really needs a whole lot of muscle to display weather and news headlines. The Chumby One’s screen also seems sharper than the Classic’s, and the overall package is shorter and narrower, although thicker. Chumby’s selection of widgets, by the way, is quite good, with a huge selection of clocks, social networking services, news, RSS feeds, games and other fun little time wasters.

I’m conflicted about the Chumby One. On the one hand, it’s totally unnecessary — it can’t really do anything a modern smartphone with a dock can’t do better, and at $US100 it’s sort of expensive for an alarm clock. On the other hand, I’m undeniably taken with this thing. It does a good job delivering the time, weather, news and RSS feeds, running Pandora and waking me up, and it looks adorable while doing it. If you’re comfortable dropping $US100 on a little plastic cube of widgets for your bedside table, go for it.

Awesome retro design with clean and simple UI

Runs widgets admirably

Substantial price cut, but not quite impulse-purchase territory

Doesn’t do anything your smartphone can’t

“Hack Days” are intended to celebrate creativity as developers race to create Web apps in less than 24 hours. And past events have had performances from Beck and Girl Talk. But hiring go-go dancers isn’t exactly going to attract more women to the male-dominated industry.

It’s not much worse than some of the booth babe demonstrations I’ve seen, though. And don’t tell anyone, but I’m a fan of those gals. [Yahoo Developer Blog via Simonwillison.net]

Sorry
I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the “Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit or purpose. And it’s certainly not the message we want to send about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone feel welcome, including women coders and technologists.

This incident is regrettable and we apologise to anyone that we have offended. Rest assured, it won’t happen again.

Other features include: two full-range 3-inch drive units, an optional rechargeable battery, RF remote and a 3.5mm input for hooking up additional audio sources. Widgets like Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, weather and news are available now, but the lineup should grow over time. Plus it kind of looks like something the Jetsons would have. The Sensia will be available in Europe for the equivalent of $470, but there is no word on when or if it will ever be available in Australia. [Sensia via Slashgear]

No word on new features; even though our own Matt really liked the original Chumby, he didn’t see much of a niche for it to fill. But the design has kind of an iriver neo-retro thing going on with the cubic design and big dial, and we’ve always had a soft spot for the little guy. We’ll update more as we get new information. [Ryan Block]

The company has told Forbes that “several ‘powered by Chumby’ gadgets” will launch in the coming months. They have struck partnerships with Sony, Samsung, Broadcom and others.

The first product to launch will be a digital photo frame and will be followed by TVs, Blu-Ray players, clocks and radios. Chumby, you really don’t think Yahoo’s platform is good enough, huh? [Forbes]

The Hub isn’t going to be a single, one-off device—there’s going to be a lot of different hardware running it—which alone makes the proposition much more interesting, since platforms by definition are extensible, flexible and more likely to benefit from active development. In other words, it can and will get better over time.

Today I saw the software update that’s coming in a few weeks, as well as builds further out in the future running on prototype hardware, which introduces among other things, a WebKit browser (same as Safari, Chrome, Palm Pre, etc.) a real email client, and a Twitter app. The big thing is that, like every other phone OS it seems, it’s getting an App Market or “Widgets Bazaar,” where you can—duh—download apps to your Hub. For now, every widget will come from Verizon, like a Flickr screensaver app or a pretty swell Rhapsody app that lets you stream music. But! The Hub is built on Linux and will eventually be opened up for anybody to develop for, which is obviously when it’ll be able to reach its full potential. It kind of reminds me of Chumby, except it’s a full-fledged VOIP phone too. Unfortunately, they don’t have a timeline on when that’s happening.

There’s also no exact timeline for the new hardware either, though a “new release of some kind every few months” is what they’re aiming for. The new Hub hardware corrects a lot of the first-gen’s problems: Namely, it’s got a capacitive touchscreen (the kind that the iPhone, G1 and Storm have) meaning it’ll be a much better—maybe even multitouch—experience. It’s also just way sexier: The excess fat has been trimmed off, so one version is just like a glossy seven-inch upright touch tablet, while another version has it floating on a speaker, more like a multimedia hub. The new phone is more commensurate with the device too—glossy, ergonomic and with a nicer screen. Verizon’s thinking about offering a range of different handsets with more capable premium models that can text message from the phone and cheaper basic ones.

Also down the road is more integration with other Verizon stuff, like FiOS. They’re toying with a remote DVR app, for instance, which would be pushed just to people who have FiOS. With everything on a common Linux platform, the hope is that developers will be able to whip up a single app that’ll run across everything Verizon—their FiOS boxes, phones and of course, the Hub.

If you’re wondering what direction the phone companies are trying to roll in, this is pretty much it—AT&T is doing similar things with U-Verse and its mobile side—wrapping you in a giant, head-to-toe Snuggie of data supplied exclusively by them. [Verizon]

A team from RWTH Aachen University in Germany and UC San Diego have been working together to develop Silicone Illuminated Active Peripherals, or “SLAP Widgets” to bring physical controls to multitouch in the form of plastic and silicone objects. It’s kind of a middle ground between physical and virtual devices.

SLAP widgets are transparent. This means we can always show the current labelling using the table’s rear projection underneath the widget. For example, we can change the labels on our keyboard from normal characters to shortcut commands when the modifier key is held down. This makes it easier to use command shortcuts and other special keyboard mappings.

Each SLAP widget, like a keypad for example, has visual markers on its bottom side. When put onto a table, the markers are registered by the table using a technique called Diffuse Illumination, or DI.

When SLAP widgets are pressed like for example the keypad, keyboard, and knob, however, there is no additional marker to detect. Instead, a different technique called FTIR, or frustrated total internal reflection, is used: IR light fed sideways into the tabletop stays inside the acrylic surface until disturbed by touch. The camera beneath the table detects the point of touch from the scattered IR light.

As you will see in the video from the project webpage, the technology is pretty damn cool—although, to me, having actual, physical peripherals in any form still seems like a step backwards. [Project Page via Core77]

When the TVs hit shelves next month, the only content on offer will be YouTube (without the ability to search) and a weather app. NineMSN’s content will be arriving sometime in August, so long as everything goes to plan. The deal with NineMSN also doesn’t mean that yoyu’ll never see a Flickr widget on their TVs – it’s definitely something Samsung or working on implementing.

Part of the NineMSN content planned is a location based entertainment guide, with information on local cinemas, restaurants and bars all available through your TV, including menus and restaurant types. All that’s required is for you to enter your postcode, and the NineMSN content engine will offer the rest.

Like Panasonic’s Viera Cast, all the content is aggregated on Samsung’s own servers, which means that they can implement updates without you requiring to download an update for your TV.

While it’s still very early days for this type of integrated IP technology in home entertainment hardware, it’s actually a really promising start. Sure, we’ll probably never get a Bittorrent client built in to our TVs, but simple web content is probably all that most people will use.

It’s done by the same guy who brought Leopard’s “stacks” feature to your bottom row of icons. It looks like it’s running smoothly with a few test widgets, but I’m not sure if I see the appeal when the phone’s UI is already fairly widgetised. No single application is ever more than a few swipes and a tap away, so I’m not convinced this is better than simply popping open the notes or the weather app (or in the case of the clock, looking two inches above to the clock that’s already running).

Get compatibility for OS X widgets on the iPhone? Now I’m listening. I’m not sure if that’s even possible, but I could see that being something I would jailbreak for. [ModMyi Forums]

That, and the Linux OS’s hackability. If it’s still just as hackable, having the engine embedded in TVs and Blu-ray players might actually actually produce a race of super Blu-ray players that play Quake, eat babies, connects to MySpace and actually competes with the Yahoo! widget engine we saw in a bunch of TVs at CES. [CrunchGear]