Chumby grows up, dates Samsung
Reference designs from major manufacturer point to consumer digital picture frames in Chumby's future.
The cute little beanbag-encased, open-source Chumby (my review), an Internet display device, is growing up through a partnership with Samsung. The original Chumby software makes the device into a good digital photo frame functionally, but the hardware is too small and bulky to compete with other dedicated frames. This partnership will get the Chumby software into more consumer-friendly hardware--eventually.
The Samsung product is a reference design, not a shipping item. I do hope we see Chumby-powered full-sized photo frames this year. The Chumby architecture makes it easy to upload photos to your device from a photo sharing site like Picasa Web or Flickr, as all the work is done on a PC in a browser and updates go to the display device over a home's Wi-Fi.
The Chumby platform can also deliver other widgets to a display device: weather forecasts, RSS feeds, and so on.