CNET Asia and Hardware Zone Get Playtime With the Zii EGG
CNET Asia and Hardware Zone got an invitation from Creative to come play around with the Zii EGG. CNET brought along a video camera and demonstrated a very small bit of the OS in addition to a full overview of the physical features. While overviews of products on the outside are always welcome, it’s likely going to be the internal operating system that sells the device. The short sequences of Plaszma that they showed looked gorgeous, but not really enough to formulate an opinion.
inPerson Video Conferencing System Gets OEM Treatment, Wireless
After this week’s staggering news regarding the new touchscreen player comes the business as usual news from Creative. The inPerson conferencing system, announced quite a while back, has finally gained some real traction in the OEM market. While we don’t have sales figures or stats, the inPerson really hasn’t made any news at all, and probably is considered a bust financially. Finally, someone may turn that around. Today, Creative and Walsh Wireless have announced that they have teamed up to package the inPerson system with Sprint wireless, thus resulting in truly wireless high quality video conferencing. Originally with wifi for the office building, the new system will work anywhere that there is a Sprint data connection, which means only really large US cities. Not a huge announcement from the company, but a bit of positive news from a product that we all thought was dead in the water is perhaps a good sign of things to come. Intriguing moreso, perhaps, because Sprint is a main rival of AT&T (exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the US), and a previously unknown OEM coming out of the woodwork for this partnership. A precursor to a Zii/Plaszma partnership with Sprint? Who knows. We can keep hoping.
Read the official PR release after the jump.
Creative Announces Zii EGG and Plaszma Platform
After many years of anticipation, ZiiLABS and Creative have finally pulled out the true successor to its fabulous ZEN Vision:M. Quite stunning, given the entire scope of what is currently going on for Creative- sales and profit margin shrinking, debt mounting the bottom line inching towards red, and brand favoribility falling within the eyes of the technology world. As a Creative fan for quite a long time, it’s finally time to breathe a sigh of relief and get back onto our fanboy horses. (Clarified thanks to Sim… Creative is currently debt-free. There have been several unprofitable quarters of late that have stressed them financially, but after a few moves remain debt-free. Thanks, Sim.)
Plaszma Platform
At the forefront of this new player is the Plaszma Platform. This is a combination of the Zii EGG device, which will be discussed in-depth later, and the Plaszma software side. While ZiiLABS has written their own version of Linux for the device, it will offer Android. At launch, the Zii EGG developer’s edition will only include the Plaszma OS, but an installer for Android will be available shortly after launch, according to the press release. The Plaszma OS is written to harness the power of the powerful ZMS-05 chip, and opens up the ability to code full 3D applications and games. Also in the operating system is a desktop version of Opera 9.7. This means, unlike its primary competitor on the iPhone, which supports a specialized version of the Safari browser, the Plaszma OS supports full web browsing, including “Web 2.0 capabilities”, which includes Adobe Flash Lite 3.1. While Flash support will be available shortly after launch, this gives the EGG a big advantage because it means out of the box Hulu (in available regions) and YouTube support. The system looks drop dead gorgeous on the marketing photos, so if that is the actual interface, the beautiful ZEN user interface seems to live on with Plaszma.
The SDK for Plaszma also appears to be wooing the open source community with its extensive support. Most importantly, perhaps, is native C and C++ development. While the codec support hasn’t officially been unveiled, sources inside Creative have rumored that it surpasses the Vision:M and Vision:W in codec support. One of the reasons that the Vision:M and Vision:W were successful was the wide range of codec support, and it’s exciting to see that the engineers realized this and added on.
Zii EGG and Plaszma Platform Announced!
Creative has finally come out with the device we’ve all been waiting for- the super high tech, feature packed touchscreen device powered by Android. All the details are just filtering in, so this post will be updated several times throughout the day, including an exclusive interview with ZiiLABS.
Creative US Store Now Powered By Amazon
The Creative US site has gotten the facelift that the rest of the region got a few weeks ago. In addition to the update on the inside, the store has gotten its biggest update since the site went live way back in the twentieth century. The interface is now clean and easy to navigate, and the new URL scheme is a bit less random. It’s much easier to pick out of the lineup if you’re not able to search through the history. After much frustration, they also added a prominent search option. It’s estimated it will save billions of hours of work instead of navigating through every menu as with the old system. More importantly, however, is the new WebStore system that the company uses. While it’s still the same Creative inventory and shipping (I believe), the entire user interface is a modified version of Amazon’s fantastic system. It even uses Amazon’s system for payment, which, while still bad for PayPal and Google Checkout lovers, is better than the previous system of manual entering. Overall, it’s a much needed coat of paint on the outside and a extremely powerful system on the inside. WebStore will hopefully improve the buying process in addition to ease of RMA and shipment tracking. With the Zii looming overhead, Creative seems to have begun a turn for the better- in all departments.
1999, via Archive.org
July 2009 Update
Fancy, breadcrumb style page with Amazon theme and branding. Below are actual Amazon ratings imported from their website.
Inside the checkout process, the Amazon branding gets much more visible.
Visit the new Creative US store at the new url: us.store.creative.com.
The Creative Zii Egg- THE TOUCHSCREEN ZEN! Is Finally Here!
Engadget has it for officiality.
The bombshell Creative has been holding over us for quite some time was finally dropped today, as the touchscreen ZEN we’ve been waiting for has finally appeared in black and white form, thanks to the ineptness of the US Government (wow long sentence, but it’s that important!). It seems time to bring out a trumpet or two and hearld the entrance of the Zii Egg, the newest device coming out of the little company that could. It definitely has a touchscreen front, plays MP4 files, has a high definition camera on the front (as opposed to its fruity touch competitor), and is powered by the omnipotent Zii chip that has been dragging down Creative’s financials since the buyout of 3DLabs. The exact same Zii chip, mind you, that demonstrated high definition playback and Android OS support. As more information comes to us, we’ll post it here. Stay tuned!
Confirmed:
Touchscreen
High Definition Camera on back
Zii-Powered
Called the “Zii Egg”
Wireless Internet 802.11 b/g
Li-Polymer battery (Lithium Ion methinks)
Bluetooth (see below for confirmation)
Two versions: Creative Zii for consumers and Creative Zii Egg for developers.
Unconfirmed:
HDMI Out: bottom of drawing looks suspicious, and previous ZMS-05 (the processor’s official name) demonstrations of HD output to TV
SD Card: left side of drawing suggest as much
Android operating system
CNET’s MP3 Gurus, Donald Bell and Jasmine France discuss the player for the first few minutes:
Zii Coming To Phones? Next ZEN to Get Social Networking?
Rumormongering forthcoming: While it’s almost assured that there will be a Zii inside a Creative player by the end of the calendar year, Creative has always strayed away from venturing into the phone market. Change may be in the air, however, as a survey from the Zii team today asked a peculiar question- Are you using a Smartphone, 3.5G phone, Blackberry or Pushmail service? A followup question asked what features you use most on your phone, and it listed some pretty standard smartphone features like email and web browsing. It’s interesting that they would ask this, as Creative hasn’t touched the mobile phone market, and their wifi implementation on the ZEN X-Fi came off as half baked at best. It could also just be an innocent question to gauge the demographics of interested users, or it could signal a new direction for the new ZiiLabs with Creative. Either way, it caught my eye. This survey was sent to anyone and everyone who signed up for the Zii newsletters.
Also of note, there’s a question about which social network(s) the survey taker use. There hasn’t been any social networking integration in any Creative devices (the ZEN X-Fi has Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger support), so it’s curious as to why they would ask a question. But several theories with only miniscule facts suggest that it could be part of the touchscreen ZEN that Creative has had brewing for quite some time. While nothing official has been release, there have been several oddities that official Creative sources have dropped- namely Phil O’Shaughnessy (VP of Creative Americas). epiZENter.net asked him about a forthcoming Zii-powered ZEN and he gave a sly “Stay tuned” response. My advice: stay tuned!
Take the survey for yourself at zii.com.
Be the first to hear about the upcoming Zii products- sign up for the Zii newsletter here.
A Splash of Color to the EP-630s and Creative’s Website
Creative’s in a bit of a lull lately. Between the recently-released Mk II Fatal1ty Headset and these new EP-630 earbuds, it’s pretty apparent that the big guns have been out and about designing the touchscreen ZEN. Regardless, they did add a few more colors to the lineup of their excellent EP-630 earbuds. There’s now a white, pink, baby blue, and lime green version in addition to the black pair.
Additionally, the Creative website for every major region sans America has gotten a minor facelift. The backdrop is now a cleaner and lighter color, and most of the product pages have a slightly more cleaner look. I like it, and hopefully Creative US will follow as they have in the past. Though it would be excellent if they fixed the twitter advertisement on the new pages. The links are broken on all the sites.
Creative Launches ZEN Mozaic EZ2300 and Aurvana Air
UPDATE: Vado HD on Sale at Amazon US!
Amazon has the Vado HD at a good price- $179. But to sweeten the deal, they will drop you $50 in store credit within the next 35 days after you purchase this great camera. This makes a great low-cost graduation gift for any graduate as well as a great gift for anyone with any thoughts of making videos.
B
uy the Vado HD on sale at Amazon now!
During our post-CES but pre summer gadget swoon, Creative has dropped one notable and one less notable product upon us.
Mozaic EZ2300
Basically just the Mozaic with a little black dress on it. Rather than the checkered style of the current Mozaic, the EZ2300 is completely black. It does keep the same input pad style, so no new news there. On the inside, it’s essentially the same player, except for the changing of a MTP device to a plug and play one. (more…)
Updated: X-Fi and SoundBlaster Drivers for Windows 7
Quick updates: Creative has issued a minor update for their X-Fi and SoundBlaster cards for the Windows 7 Beta. The X-Fi update enables Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect features, while the SoundBlaster driver addresses an issue regarding the volume control becoming unresponsive after plugging in and removing an audio device. Included in the SoundBlaster update is a fix to the X-Fi Notebook, which allows for a speaker icon to appear in Entertainment Mode, and an update for the X-Fi Xtreme Audio Karaoke, which resolves the issue of the Wireless Music Control button appearing in Volume Pane. As with all Windows 7 Beta drivers from Creative, this is a beta, so take precautions before downloading.
SoundBlaster Driver: Creative | Tech in Hiding SkyDrive
X-Fi Driver: Creative | Tech in Hiding SkyDrive
