A couple of days ago I mentioned that I received a Chumby. It's essentially a general purpose Linux-based computer, running in an shell that's something like the love-child of a bean bag and an alarm clock. The Chumby runs a Flash-based application environment, and anyone is invited to write "applications." I put that in quotes because many applications don't make sense. A spreadsheet on a Chumby is pretty silly.
In a way, it's sort of like improvisational Jazz -- the Chumby is defining a "frame" in which application writers are invited to improvise. You can't go nuts and build just any application and expect a good reception. Some things work within that frame, some don't.
For lack of a better term, I'll call this an embedded-general-purpose computer. It's neither one nor the other, and I think this sort of design is an important trend. To be sure, the Chumby isn't the first -- many phones for example allow installable applications that should respect the "frame" of the platform to be successful. But what's changing is that the cost of building a limited purpose device with general purpose class hardware is of course dropping.
Recently Asus launched the $200-$300 Eee PC -- it's small and not that "powerful" in the traditional sense, but make no mistake -- it's a capable notebook PC with WiFI, flash storage, a decent screen, etc. It's not a big jump to think that within 5 years, sub $100 reasonably capable computers will be widely available. That's less than the cost of the Chumby.
Imagine an Eee PC, taken apart, and mounted in a hardcover book. It comes with many slips of paper that can slide in the spine and cover of the book to give it a nicely printed title. Configure it to launch the web browser and go to the front page of Wikipedia when opened, and slide in the "Encyclopedia" strips on the outside cover and spine and put it on the shelf. Change it to go to a Project Gutenberg collection and put on the "Shakespeare" slips. The possibilities are limitless and still nicely limited.
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