What the heck is a Chumby8, anyway? Depending on how you’d like to use it, at $199, it’s either the most sophisticated alarm clock in the world, or it’s a clunky, anachronistic distant relative of the iPad with a non-removable kickstand in the back.
Like its older brethren, the Chumby Classic and Chumby One, Chumby8 wirelessly connects to your Wi-Fi network, and then lets you use one of its 1500+ apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Pandora. By far, its strongest capabilities are its alarm clock features, able to launch apps or wake you up to music or anything else, whenever you schedule them.
I’ve been a Chumby user for a couple of years now, so I’ve grown accustomed to its idiosyncrasies. Why did I call it a clunky distant relative of the iPad? Because if you compare its screen with that of the iPad, this one feels like a throwback to the ’90s. It doesn’t use the easy capacitive touchscreen of most of today’s tablets that requires just the lightest of touches. Instead, it has an old-fashioned resistive touchscreen that’s a lot less sensitive, making you push harder or even use a fingernail to assure that it works. It takes some getting used to.
Chumby8′s 8-inch 800×600 LCD touchscreen has narrow viewing angles, so unless you’re sitting right in front of it, it looks dimmer as you move to the side, or above or below it. Even though it looks fairly sharp and bright, it’s just not a very good screen. For a device that costs $200, you’d expect its screen to be better than this.
It has a 800MHz Marvell Armada 166 processor whose clock rate is almost twice as fast as the Chumby One (c ompare the Chumby One and...
