Portable Weather Station

Reviews

It's OK, has some nice features and some major shortcomings. It works well as an alarm clock as you can customize alarms as much you want and offers a variety of sounds. The available widgets vary greatly in their usefulness. It can be pretty handy to wake up to the weather. On the other hand, as a previous reviewer pointed out, the wifi reception is poor and the Chumby is very frustrating to use as an internet radio. At times it can stream music such as Pandora without problems but other times it constantly skips and freezes. The customer service responded very promptly to complaints but tried to blame the problem on interference. There are a number of complaints on the Chumby forums about weak wifi. The FM radio is worthless. I can't get a single station. The speaker is decent. It is fine for alarms and spoken broadcasts, not so much for music. The touchscreen is also rather mediocre and I occasionally have to touch the screen a few or even several times for it to register.

Chumby One is a nice toy, designed to provide snippets of the internet in a fun way. Since it's supposed to be always connected, it is very disappointing that its WiFi reception is so weak. It can't connect to a b/g router 20 feet away, and behind a wall. Nice little unit, if you keep it in the same room as your wifi router.

I received this as a gift in December and the family liked this cool internet toy. The novelty has worn off and I found that the chumby would sit in the kitchen unpowered for weeks. Nobody would bother to plug it in. So I have relocated Chumby to my office and reset to appropriate widgets. I like it here. So I think its value is more personal than as a shared item. You need to think about the user and setting before buying, which is true about any gift really. My 2 cents.

I like the graceful alarms, Internet radio, etc. Biggest problem is you can not lock it and the 2 year old messes up the configuration on an almost daily basis. Wish it had an iPhone style PIN login.