I just received my Chumby One – the budget version of last year’s most hyped internet device. These days they are positioning it as the world’s most advanced bedside clock radio (which would be true apart from the fact that Pure Digital just launched the relatively expensive Sensia ).

Upon unboxing the device my first surprise was the size of the thing. The official photography gives the impression of a device which might be approximately fifteen to twenty cm wide. The actual device is slightly more than ten centimetres, and that’s including the volume knob which sticks out the side. It’s a really compact device.

Chumby comes with an international power adaptor. Set-up of the device consists of nothing more than attaching this to a wall-socket, plugging in the Chumby One and then answering some simple questions about the local WiFi connection. Initial set-up takes about five minutes. From then on all you have to do is choose what widgets you want and set up your multimedia.

There’s a wide selection of useful widgets, for example local five-day weather (provided by the BBC) or a the next 24 hours in your Google calendar. There are also some quite bizarre ones: The default channel includes a selection of popular videos from youtube and “Prelenger Mash-ups” which are wired video compositions assembled from the historical oddities curated at archive.org. You can also set up a Flickr.com viewer which converts the Chumby into a not particularly high-resolution digital photo frame. There are also quite a few social networking widgets including at least ten different ways to present your twitter feed along with some quite good facebook viewers.

All of the above would give the impression that Chumby is intended to be a practical device. Most of the widgets are rather silly and useless compared to the ones I have listed. Finding the good ones took about half an hour of search and at this point I’m convinced that most of the rest are redundant: There are a few hundred different variations on the idea of clock, and an awful lot of quite boring flash games which I shall pretend do not exist.

The other part of Chumby’s claim to fame is it’s multimedia: It comes with the ability to play internet radio and FM. I found the FM receiver was not particularly sensitive. It was barely able to receive very strong signals from nearby transmitters. That’s possibly a consequence of placing an FM receiver in the same tiny box as an active WiFi transceiver. I wonder why they bothered? Surely the people who buy this sort of device want it for it’s Internet capabilities.

Fortunately the Internet radio feature really does work. Unlike the widgets which are controlled via your web-browser from a PC, the multimedia features are controlled exclusively via the Chumby’s touch-screen. I’m not sure why they did this since the screen is rather small and it’s very difficult to select which from the thousands of Internet radio streams you want to hear.

The audio browser is very bad: In order to hear something you must first select from a range of sources including Pandora (not available in Europe), MediaFly, manually configured streams, FM Radio, a whole bunch of obscure audio aggregators, media files available via the USB or network. Having chosen your source you are then presented with multiple levels of hierarchical menu in order to select the actual audio audio you want to hear.

This part of the Chumby experience really does not work very well since switching from one kind of audio to another is a real nuisance. Even a modest DAB radio makes changing channels easy compared to this. I suspect that Chumby users will simply pick one audio source and leave it set to that rather than have the bother of browsing. I hope Chumby Industries find a way to simplify this – they could use the same web-interface they use to manage their widgets for audio.

Incidentally, this is how Pure and Reciva based radios work: You do all your browsing via a normal web-browser from your PC. On the device there’s no need to browse a huge menu – you can select from the favourites which you have already chosen.

In summary, I’m happy with the device. It’s an interesting addition to my bedroom. It looks rather silly opposite my wife’s substantially more expensive (and stylish) Pure Sensia which can play a wider variety of sounds. The Chumby One by comparison is better at playing video and has a much wider selection of widgets.

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