Portable Weather Station

Reviews

for the price, this internet radio far out performs any other internet radio in this price range.

The Chumby doesn't do much of anything really, really well. But for the money it does quite a bit pretty darn well. It is a fun device. A great value IMO. I use it daily to play music from Pandora and to stream pics from Picasa. Also lets me stay up to date on stock market and headline news, and offers quite a few other cool apps. Kind of lame for games - I would definitely not recommend it to someone who planned to use it that way. I was very tempted to give this a 5 star rating, but it just does not quite have the quality and consistency of performance to warrant that.

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.