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Creative got us all excited when it unveiled its Android-powered Zii Egg last month. Creative has now announced the coming of the next device in the Zii family called the Zii MediaBook. The MediaBook is the company's first entry into the eBook market. The device will compete alongside the Barnes & Noble Nook and the Amazon Kindle.
Creative’s Zii EGG developer unit has been on sale for some time now, but it’s taken the company a little time to deliver the promised Android update. However, according to a Twitter message from the Zii team, ZiiLABS will be releasing the Android installer “next week”.
Creative’s Zii has now made a full appearance at the FCC, complete with break-down images and a user guide. The document refers to the device – which uses Creative’s new ZMD 05 Plaszma module – as the Zii and not the Zii EGG, the developer edition, and that along with the language of the user guide has led to suggestions that this could in fact be the upcoming consumer version of the device.
We’re indecently curious about Creative’s imminent Zii EGG developer design, what with its iPhone-like looks, 10-point multitouch display and potent ZMD 05 “Plaszma” module, so it’s interesting to see the first of the hands-on reports from over in Asia. HardwareZone and CNET both stopped by the Creative offices to take a look.
Creative have been showing off some of their new Zii EGG developer device’s 3D gaming skills, with a video of the iPod touch-like handheld running a 3D OpenGL ES enhanced racing game complete with accelerometer control. The company has also released a more technical video about their StemCell Computing platform, demonstrating some of the abilities of the ZMS 05 System Module at the Zii EGG’s core.
Video demo after the cut
Creative have announced their Zii EGG developer platform, the test hardware for coders to get to grips with their freshly “Plaszma” branded Stemcell Computing system. The Zii EGG runs Google’s Android OS on top of Creative’s ZMS-05 chipset, and promises not only WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and a 3.5-inch 320 x 480 10-point multitouch display, but 1080p video output, HD playback and OpenGL ES support.
Video demo after the cut
Creative have been demonstrating their new Zii platform this week at CES, catchily titled “Stemcell Computing”, which is promising a huge shift in how multimedia is handled by mobile devices. Zii comprises a number of scalable Processing Elements, or PEs, each of which can be individually re-tasked to different tasks. In that way, rather than a device having a set amount of video decoding, encoding or high-definition processing capability, it can selectively assign generic PEs to whatever the task at hand.
Creative are preparing to launch a new processing chip at CES 2009, Zii, which the company is advertising as using “Stemcell Computing”. Announced via a teaser webpage, Zii is believed to be a different type of product to the company’s X-Fi audio processing chip, and will find its way into a variety of upcoming products.
JP
