Chumby halts hardware sales, long-term support looking mighty unlikely
"The site is closed temporarily." Never a good sign, indeed, and particularly not when it's plastered across Chumby's own webstore. For over two days now, that's the message given to anyone attempting to buy hardware from the company, and it looks as if the Chumby we knew may be counting down its final days. A scrappy upstart attempting to bring its Chumby OS to the masses via injections into larger OEMs, the outfit saw little to no uptake across a wide variety of products; Sony nixed the Dash earlier this year, and Insignia turned its back quite some time ago. To be fair, Chumby had stopped manufacturing its own branded hardware in 2011, with the outfit's Duane Maxwell confirming the outright death of Chumby's store in a forum posting today. According to him, there was "no point in keeping the store around once inventory was exhausted," though hardcore loyalists can still snag a NeTV from adafruit.
Other forum members have noted that all support emails now seem to be headed into the Great Beyond, and while the actual network that Chumby OS relies on remains alive at the moment, there's no guarantee it'll last. Interestingly, at least two individuals instrumental in the building of Chumby are now working at Media Navi -- both Alison Fay and Michael Coleman have moved Chumby-related job listings to "Past" in their LinkedIn profiles. We'll be reporting more as we get it, but in the meanwhile, we'd recommend giving your favorite Chum a warm hug. His / her heart may not be beating for too much longer.
[Thanks, Jonathan]
