Fun to see this. I was gifted an internal Chumby prototype that was given to a VP at my company who asked me if we could do anything with it. We couldn't, but I thought it was a cute concept (it had a soft/plush body versus the more standard rigid plastic and was marketed as very approachable I wrote a few AS3 apps for it and concluded there were enough hardware limitations that it wasn't worth bothering with. But fo…
Chumby was 10 years too early. The Amazon Echo Show and equivalent devices for other platforms fulfill that use case today, but with a lot less charm.
And it didn't even have to complete in the Show/Portal/HomePod space. There are dozens of half-baked projects where people glue LCDs to RPIs to make a simple Linux-enabled display and Chumby had all of this in a nice package, ready to go.
There's a total need for this type of device again but nobody takes these kinds of risks anymore. My Chumby was a Best Buy Insignia model and I'm amazed BB even greenlit this thing. It was on clearance like six months after it launched.