Knowing Glances: Souped-Up Digital Frames Include Chumby, Sony Dash, Insignia InfoCast

Feb. 17, 2011— -- In 2007, an upstart group of hackers began selling a digital beanbag with a 3.5-inch screen called the Chumby.

The original idea was for other hackers to turn it into whatever they wanted it to be. But Chumby provided an easy way to get content on the device by letting developers launch simple programs that mostly displayed information from the Internet, or provided basic interactivity via its touch screen.

These include information such as status updates from Twitter or Facebook, top news stories from popular sources, and the latest posts from many major blogs.

Now, other companies are seeing the value in the thousands of Chumby channels (now called "apps," to cash in on the smartphone spree) that have come into being over the past two years.

Two of the biggest names in consumer electronics, Sony and Best Buy, have incorporated Chumby's service into devices that have much larger screens than the original Chumby. Sony calls its version the Dash; Best Buy sells the Insignia InfoCast. (Insignia also makes a version with a 3.5-inch screen, like the Chumby.) They can bypass the PC to make adding apps easy.

The hope is that a bit of Internet connectivity magic can prop up sales for two flagging product categories -- alarm clocks and digital picture frames, the latter of which declined 31 percent in unit sales from 2009 to 2010, according to NPD's Retail Tracking Service.

Indeed, like the original Chumby, both devices have dim nighttime clock displays designed to emit minimal light as you're trying to sleep, and both can go completely dark. While neither can operate using batteries like an iPad, they both keep physical buttons to a minimum. There is a single "home" button on the top of the device.

Insignia's InfoCast is an 8-inch device that looks similar to many digital picture frames on the market. Its colorful user interface includes sections for accessing music, photos and video.

In addition to the core Chumby widgets, the InfoCast can also access these kinds of content from other PCs that may be on a home network. Content can also be added through USB ports and memory card slots on the device (it includes both the now seldom-used Compact Flash format and the Memory Stick format still used by Sony cameras, but not present on the Sony Dash).