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Comment by traspler | Hacker News Reader

I got one of the soft, ball-like chumbys when they came out. Really, really amazing design and packaging :) I tried to love it as much as it radiated good vibes but sadly from the very beginning it was kind of janky and at the time the usefulness was not that clear to me. Too bad the cheerfulness of such hardware got lost along the way.

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I think the Chumby came out just a little too late. Great idea, but like so many things the post-iPhone-smartphone began to fill all the roles that those things filled

I was thinking about the brief life of the dedicated flash video cameras. They were more capable than phones of the era, but they couldn’t share on their own.

The Chumby also came out early enough that it had to rely on Flash Lite [1] for authoring content. This severely limited the audience that could build content for it; if it had came out a bit later, with better hardware, it could have potentially been used to display HTML content, and things might have gone differently.

[1]: https://www.adobe.com/mena_en/products/flashlite/

I was thinking about the brief life of the dedicated flash video cameras. They were more capable than phones of the era, but they couldn’t share on their own.

Those are still used in environments where that is a feature, not a bug.

I had a Chumby 8 for a while. It was cool - I was able to stream TV shows to it using the TVersity flash interface.

It never really got enough software for it to ever get out of the "janky and promising" stage.

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