…or how “Release Early, Release Often” comes to Consumer Electronics.

Over the holidays I bought two Chumbys, one to give as a gift and one for myself. I don’t even know how to describe this thing, best just check it out on the chumby site.

A few days ago, having just started blogging again, I thought I’d post a review. Frankly, it was going to be negative because the only use I’d really found for it was as a glorified alarm clock. But this is a very curious consumer good, because the actual software gets updated via the Internet automatically whenever there’s something new to offer. It’s also got an open ‘plug-in’ type of architecture that allows people to enhance the product, and contribute their enhancements to all the other owners.

So just a couple days ago, Chumby do an over the air update to the software and suddenly, the whole interface and even feature-set have changed. It’s a whole new gadget! And the changes have been great- now I can stream internet radio from multiple sources, customize my alarms much better, and more. And as they say on the Chumby website, this is a product that will *never* be finished, because they’ll always be upgrading it with new stuff. Much like google or salesforce.com are never “finished”, but constantly evolve.

Fascinating to see this happen in the context of a consumer electronics gadget, instead of the now-common web applications.

Exciting!

(side comment: Apple is doing the same thing to its iPhone, constantly improving the product people have already bought. Now, how is it that traditional mobile phone operators and handset makers have NEVER been able to do this?)