TomSoft

Physical Widget (and revenge of the hardware)

August 28th, 2006

  I wanted to write this post since some time, but the launch of the Chumby give me a good opportunity to post it. What it Chumby? Basically it’s a small lcd screen that can run your prefereed widget, and that can be connected through WiFi to the internet. Than, you can put some kind of “Widgets” to this device, like clock, flickr viewer, stock quotes, etc…
  Unfortunately (or hopefully?) these Widget are non interactive…

  So this obviously one of the latest “physical widget”. With the adoption of Wifi, and the cut down of hardware price, I expect to see more and more small hardware  application that do a single task , but do it well…This one still have a lot of different usage, but I think that in the future we will see hardware widgets, from toys, weather station connected to the internet,  msn status, etc…
   The other interesting side effect, is that the value is less and less in the software, but both in the service (we all knew this) but also in the hardware. What will make the interest of such physical widget: it’s the design, the fact it looks cool, trendy, etc…So after years where value was mostly in software, and hardware was just a commodity, hardware, and especially “internet connected hardware” will get his revenge, software being just a commodity…

Through TechCrunch

Technorati Tags: chumby, widgets, mobilewidgets

Entry Filed under: MobileWidgets