We definitely have plans for the mic.  Stay tuned.

Bump.  What's the latest?  I have about 30 things waiting on this.

Cheers.

Well I am excited to see what becomes of this! ... I hope that there is a hook that developers could use!  I have a slight dream of using a chumby as a window between myself and my wife.  I could use a supported cam and the speakers/mic to make it pretty neat.  Note: not a very well thought out plan (in fact I have not yet checked on the webcam portion of the plan), but unlocking for devs might be great!

That's totally up to Skype - it's a closed-source system, so they'd need to port it.

I really wish you guys had put in a tiny webcam on the chumby one.  I would definitely be buying a pair of them if I could set one in my house and one in my parent's house and do video calls with them.  And from there, the things would spread like wildfire.

Soon I'm certain small, portable webcams with built-in displays will start to pop up -- the tech is easily there, someone just needs to package it up and sell it, and it'll sell fast once it gets out there.

And once generation 1 of such devices is out, gen 2 will be easy to envision, so it'll quickly take off too -- for gen 2 you put in a camera facing both forward and backward and you add features the chumby already has, like web browsing and fm tuner.

Time is limited though -- gen 3 is an iphone with a swivel camera. ;-)  And who knows, that might come out this summer, so I guess that kind of shoots this idea in the foot, huh?

Which sounds great, but what I was suggesting was actually including a small camera at the top of the chumby, just as many laptops have them built into the top edge of the clamshell.  I'm assuming you meant you connected a usb webcam...?  Or did I miss it in the specs that there's actually a camera built into chumby one?

Lurker, what camera did you use?  How many do you think the chumby's weak processor can handle (and what potential framerate could it display)?