Like the original Chumby, the new device runs widgets, widgets and more widgets. These range from Twitter and Facebook to CBS Sports, Late Night with David Letterman and more. Using built in Wi-Fi, Chumby One is constantly connected to the web, where it can pull down info to its 3.5″ color touchscreen. There’s a built-in speaker, USB port, headphone jack and power port, plus a control knob and snooze-like control button on the top.

Right now my desktop is cluttered with bits of the Internet, which is why I wanted to see the Chumby One. I’m curious how much data and entertainment I can offload from my main workspace onto a widget-based device like the Chumby. I’ll use the li’l fella for a days and then report back on my findings. For now, here’s a quick look at the Chumby One that arrived today followed by a full list of the specs.

• 3.5″ LCD color touchscreen
• Uses rechargeable lithium-ion battery (not included); about one hour on a full charge
• 4″ wide x 4″ tall x 3.5″ deep
• 1 USB 2.0 high-speed port
• 454 MHz ARM processor
• 64 MB DDR SDRAM
• 2 GB internal microSD card
• 2W mono speaker
• Stereo headphone output
• Volume knob
• FM radio tuner
• Accelerometer (motion sensor)
• ABS plastic housing
• AC adapter included
• Wi-fi connectivity (802.11 b/g)
• USB ethernet compatible
• Dimmable backlight
• One-click control panel access
• Access to free chumby content
• Over-the-air software updates

Today is the day that Esquire’s Augmented Reality application hits newstands. Using a software download and image codes in the magazine, you can get a dose of AR. It’s an interesting concept although I’m not sure it adds value just yet. Still, when I saw a video demonstration of it, I thought was pretty wild to see. And then I got to thinking — if the software keys off of a simple black and white image in front of a webcam, could I duplicate the effect with a quick drawing?

Sure enough, my first attempt — which isn’t even all that neat of a drawing — did the trick as I tried it on camera. In the video you’ll see the Esquire AR software pick up my hand drawn image, which is really just an 8 x 8 set of cubes. There’s a little meter in the AR software to show how well it’s tracking the AR image and my sketch is getting 100%! I like how you can turn and tilt the AR code and the software moves the images to match on screen. Chalk this one up with the remote controlling a car with an iPhone bit — it’s not very valuable, but it was fun to try! I may have to run out and buy the magazine to see what other AR bits they have.

While I’d never advocate this hack from a safety perspective, it’s one of the most amazing uses of an iPhone I’ve seen yet. The real magic is in all of the motors and gizmos to make it work, but Make shows that the Do It Yourselfers at Waterloo Labs are actually driving a car using their handset. With a custom application, the gas and brake pedals are activated with slider controls — moving the sliders causes dedicated motors to depress the pedals using crescent wrenches. Steering is handled by another motor, but that one takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer. Simply “turning” the iPhone clockwise or counter-clockwise allows the vehicle to steer.

Useful in the real world? Not so much. Fun to watch? You betcha!

(Netbook News via Liliputing)

With Connectify, you have a software solution to share the data connection of your PC — a secure hotspot with WPA2-Personal (AES) encryption is created via a virtual Wi-Fi interface, so any other Wi-Fi device you have can take advantage of your mobile broadband connection. And this differs from tethering options we’ve covered in the past (here for PC and here for Mac OS X) because tethering generally only allows one other device to leverage the connection. By creating a Wi-Fi hotspot, multiple devices can join in.

The obvious disadvantage of a software solution is that it requires your Windows 7 computer to be up and running. That’s where hardware like the MiFi excels — you don’t need to have computer on because the MiFi creates its own hotspot. Still, I see the advantage, so I’m hopping on the beta train for Connectify right now.

If you think you deserve to be named Master of the Digital Universe, we want to hear from you. We want your story. It’s not necessarily just about a laundry list of all the stuff you own (although if that’s what you want to send, that’s OK too). It’s about the big picture. This is a subjective contest, to be judged by the product designers, marketing and management team at Skooba Design. So if you think you’ve got a story, sell it. Tell us what you’ve got, what you carry, how you travel, how you use your tech, why you’re always 2 steps ahead of every technology development, whatever it may be. The better picture you paint, with words, images or video (more info on entry page), the better we can judge your story.

So get your story in to Skooba, I’m pretty confident many of you can be competitive. The prize package the winner gets is very unique, too. The grand prize winner gets to work with a Skooba designer to create the absolute, most perfect gear bag. This will end up being a one-of-a-kind bag that only the winner will have. Now that’s geek heaven.

Image courtesy Skooba Design

For cheating on Jeopardy! or the latest history test at school, the WikiReader might come in handy. But for now, I’ll stick with my phone and the real, live Wikipedia. Check Amazon for availability if you want the world’s biggest encyclopedia in your pocket.

You’ll need an HP printer on your wireless network for printing to work, of course. But it’s a handy, wire-free way to get prints from a smartphone, no?

How might that happen? The AR approach has to add more value and be easier to use than a currently available situation for me to use it. Since I can use any modern mapping app to find static locations nearby, the Yelp implementation isn’t something I’d use often. But user generated content might be appealing, provided it comes from a broad base of UGC platforms. I’d also like to get a virtual view of other data layers that change a little more often than brick-and-mortar storefronts.

Colin Gibbs envisions similar augmented reality opportunities in his recent GigaOM Pro report (subscription required). Since I’ve only had a cursory experience with AR, it was interesting to hear about other current solutions, future plans and challenges the AR experience faces. The most impressive one Colin mentioned was Layar for the Android platform. Like Yelp, it uses the camera to “see” your reality and then adds virtual layers of information to the view. This video demonstration impressed me enough to install the app on a G1 handset. In the demo, Layar is used in a neighborhood to show which homes are for sale, info about the home and a hot link to call the realtor. And that’s just one of many data layers available in the app: Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr and plenty more can be layered into your reality.

What makes this all work is the smartphones of today, Colin notes. The devices have virtually been enterprise-centric until recent years, but now feature phones are on the decline and smartphones are the future kings. Processing power has increased at the same time that wireless broadband has expanded in coverage and speed. Combined with massive amounts of useful data, the smartphone of today just might be my window into the world of tomorrow — both real and virtual.

Care to share any augmented reality experiences or have any other AR apps for me to look at?

(via TRFJ)

The interface shown on the Codex is a hybrid implementation of a Microsoft tool made for Tablet PCs, InkSeine. The photos of the Codex show this graphical interface that is designed to be used much like the video of the Courier demonstrates. Write anywhere in ink and drag objects around. It is interesting to see where the Courier may have gotten its roots.

(images from Microsoft)

The MovieWedge is basically a shaped bean bag that is designed to prop up small gadgets. It is sized for phones in particular, but it looks like it could be used for small UMPCs and the like, too. I don’t know if I would carry one of these around but at $9.95 I’m sure some folks would.

I’ve said before that I want to get rid of phone numbers. Seriously. I’d love for my contacts to just call me and not a number. But I’m not sure having people call me on the phone through Twitter is what I want. Regardless, this new demonstration service from JAJAH is pretty interesting. JAJAH wisely grabbed the @call Twitter identity, and it’s using it as a connector for its service.

Here’s how it works. You put two bits of information in a tweet, an @call followed by the Twitter ID of who you want to call. JAJAH rings your phone and then rings the phone of the person in your tweet. Neither party has any idea of what phone number they’re calling or speaking to. But the service requires both folks to be JAJAH users, so for the moment, the demonstration is pretty limited.

With MyQ, I can generally do everything I need to with my Netflix queue for both the DVDs and the instant streaming. I had to allow access for the application to view my Netflix account, but that was a quick and painless process. Once I did that, I was all set for easy queue management, title searches, and even movie ratings. There are short descriptions of each title, making it easy to see if it’s something we want to watch. One minor quirk — I see that some of the titles in my queue are listed in the Blu-ray format. We don’t have a Blu-ray player, and all of the titles we chose are DVD, so there’s a small disconnect there.

As an interesting aside: MyQ for Netflix comes from Nexapps, the folks who make the wildly popular Gmail notifier for Firefox. That HTML, CSS and Javascript stuff seems to be pretty useful after all, no?

These days I only use my lapdesk solution with a netbook and that’s more due to the size of the device. I’m finding that standard notebooks sit pretty well on my lap, but the smaller base of a netbook doesn’t. What’s the consensus out there: play it safe and smart with a lapdesk or go crazy with a computer right on your lap?

This only works on incoming Google Voice calls at the moment, so don’t try it with an outgoing conversation. I just pinged someone to call me just so I can see how well it does, or doesn’t, work. I’m hoping it does work well because it would be useful if had Google Voice ringing the wrong phone or if that particular handset’s battery were running low.