Gallery: Unboxing Chumby One

Chumby Industries just released the successor to their widget-based Internet appliance, the Chumby One. The $99 device, is essentially a small touchscreen computer that grabs data from your WiFi connection and displays purpose-built widgets in a rotation.

Some liken Chumby to a Web-enabled alarm clock, but I prefer to keep one in my kitchen and bathroom to catch up on my RSS feeds while cooking and yes, brushing my teeth. (Chefs: do yourself a favor and check out the Big Oven widget).

Chumby does much more than display RSS and recipes however. Although I use mine mostly as a glorified RSS client, there are widgets for weather, time, horoscopes, Twitter, Facebook, music and games.

I previously reviewed the Chumby Classic in May 2008 and the latest model looks like a worthy successor. At only $99 it's half the price of the original and features a hardware volume knob, snooze bar and a more, ahem, professional looking form factor that would complement any workspace.

I've only had it for an hour, so I'll reserve my judgment for a future installment in these pages, but so far, it's a worthy successor to the original, ground-breaking device.

I've posted some unboxing photos in this gallery, including some photos comparing Chumby One to the "classic" beanbag version.