So I just found out about the Chumby and Sony Dash

[Stirolak123]

It seems these devices do exactly what the iPad was meant for so what is the catch by getting them instead for one fifth of the price?

http://www.gearlog.com/2011/01/chumby_8_debuts.php

 

[alectheking]

It semw these devices do exactly what the iPad was mewnt for so what is the catch by getting them instead for one fifth of the price?

http://www.gearlog.com/2011/01/chumby_8_debuts.php

holy cow! great find! why did I ever waste so much money on my stupid iPad...i feel like a fool

 

[Stirolak123]

Well apparently the original ones only really let you browse content but not interact but who knows what that new verson shown at ces will do. But many people only use the ipad to browse anyway eap professionals who need the keyboard and their maca to do proper blogging or word processing without making mistakes anyway. Here is the wony dash engaget description I found (but again the new chumby might be completely more interactive):
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/01/sony-dash-review/

"When we first saw the Sony Dash at CES, we thought Sony was making a play into the tablet game -- the promo video showed people using the angular device all over the house, with nary a power cord in sight. And hey, it was called the Dash -- a word which usually implies movement of some kind. So obviously we were a little put off when we found out the Dash was strictly a stationary experience -- an amped-up alarm clock running a Sony-tweaked version of the Chumby widget OS that lets you look at photos from Facebook, browse headlines on Engadget, and check Twitter from the Dash's seven-inch capacitive touchscreen. But hold up: the Dash also adds in Sony's Bravia Internet Video platform to support streaming media services like Netflix, Pandora, and Slacker.

The Dash runs Linux, and most of the widgets run inside a Chumby OS layer, which also currently ships on the $119 Chumby One and $149 Chumby Classic. Sony's done some extensive tweaking to the system, mostly to take advantage of the larger display with more info-rich homescreens and a streaming media player, but apart from that, this is the same Chumby Engine you know and... probably don't know, actually. Let's start over: the Dash runs Chumby OS on top of a custom Linux build. Chumby OS is basically a Flash runtime, and Chumby widgets -- Sony calls them Dash Apps -- are little Flash modules that pull data from the cloud. These are the same widgets that owners of the old plush Chumby and the Chumby One are already well-acquainted with -- they're optimized for "glanceable" information. In addition to the Chumby stuff, Sony's added its robust (and exclusive) Bravia Internet Video streaming media layer, which enables apps from Netflix, Pandora, Slacker, Amazon Video On Demand, YouTube and a host of other providers. Yep, it's a big Flash-based alarm clock that can run widgets in the background -- bet you never saw that coming."

 

[Stirolak123]

Yep flash and web browsing is oming to the new ones:
"The third important item I wanted to share was about some of the core changes to our existing software for devices already in the field. *Our team has been hard at work on a number of items that we will announce next year, but I wanted to let you know that they are in the works. *Browsers will be coming to a number of the chumby powered devices in 2011. *While we are not ready to roll it out just yet, we have been deep in testing a webkit based browser on our existing platforms. *We have a pretty high degree of confidence that we will be able to get this on most of the devices we work with although there may be some restrictions that we are not able to overcome on the chumby Classic. *Once this is in place, we will be able to do things like allow people to click on URLs from the Twitter application, validate devices on university or hotel networks, and do on device registration for services like Facebook that require web based authentication. *While we have always been able to bring a slice of the Internet to our users, this will really open the doors about what is possible going forward with these devices.

In addition to our work on browsers, we have been busy upgrading our Flash based*distribution*for our devices. *Again, we are not ready to roll it out just yet, but look for us to roll out Flash Lite 4 and Action Script 3 sometime in early 2011. *We are currently holding a contest for AS3 based applications that we want to showcase when we launch. *You can find the details here. *Like the browser situation we may not be able to hit all of our legacy platforms, but we are hoping to cover as many as possible. *We will let you know more when we get close."