Well, I have only had my chumby for a week or two so far so if some of what I say already exists, please excuse me. I have found documentation on this device mostly absent and what information there is tends to be for linux administrators, with very little useful information for general end-users.
My initial impression of the Chumby is, it is mostly incomplete. It is like the designers started working on features but did not finish any of them. Starting with the USB port. You design a device that has a USB port for thumb drives then fall way short of it actually being useful for anything other then running scripts and manual updates. Yes, you can play music off them, but there is no playlist support. There is playlist support for streaming music off the internet, but no local. Feature incomplete in my book. Same goes for alarm. I have read that you used to could play a random song for the alarm, but a recent patch broke (fixed?) that. Why? Unless you want to grow tired of a particular song that you wake to everyday, that is a stupid move. THere should be options for playing random song or playing a playlist.
Pictures on the USB drive. That too is stupid you need an app for that. That should be built in. That should have been basic feature number 1. Display a slideshow of pictures from a USB drive. How simple is that? But no, you guys decide you should leave it up to the community and the best way to do that still requires you run some startup script off a USB drive.
Useless without internet connection. This is a huge, huge failure in this device. People who use this for alarm clocks, timers or anything else are handicapped if it comes down to having to have internet connection for it to work. I do not mind the idea of it requiring an internet connection to configure channels, but it needs to store some information locally so it does not become a brick if the internet connection is lost.
Ease of use. I find there is a huge problem with the ease of use of this device. If you can live with the basic features of this device (and I mean basic), then all is good. If you try to do anything, other then setting a basic alarm or tune in one of the music channels, the difficulty levels go up exponentially. Just reading some of the posts in this thread could make your head spin. I have been working in the IT industry for over 20 years and was an old DOS buff. But honestly, to do most of the stuff on this box, you would need some extensive linux training as most of the instructions to do stuff explains it like you should already know linux.
I could probably go on about a lot more, but these are the most glaring problems IMHO. I do not plan on returning my Chumby, but I sure would not recommend it to any of my friends. If I ever meet anyone thinking about buying one, I will be sure to let them know of my experiences with it and the difficulty of getting it to do basic things. It has years of development before it before it is ready for the general end-user.
