Zii Egg Android installer arrives next week, consumer devices nowhere in sight
By Thomas Ricker 
posted October 16th 2009 4:15AM
posted October 16th 2009 4:15AM
[Thanks, Jonathan K.]
posted October 16th 2009 4:15AM
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Does anyone have one of these? I'm curious to read what they think
I have one. Its VERY buggy and takes ages to boot or transfer media, but it has potential
Yeah... the phone takes at least a minute or two to boot. It's a really nice device, but the software is absolutely terrible, imho. Putting Android on this is a step in the right direction.
I have one, and aside from a few current issues regarding a few 'bugs' and speediness, it shows great promise.
The sound quality is phenomenal, and the video quality is also top-notch, as is the build quality.
As for you BEN - YOU LIE!
There is nothing even remotely resembling a mobile phone in the Zii EGG - NOTHING!
I have one and it is very well equipped hardware wise. It has the potential to steal a lot of market share from Apples Ipod products in the PMP market, my friend called it an "iPod killer". While I think that's rather hyperbolic there is a ring of truth to it. The way it is being rolled out is another story all together. These things where hot to trot in august and early September and there was an update and improvement almost weekly. Now creatives, rather Zii's development of the closed source linux based(oxymoron I know) firmware has stagnated to the point of disappointment. This stagnation and limited availability to use all the hardware potential this device has will ultimately turn commercial developers off (in my opinion - it has to me) and kill the product before the entire roll out is completed for public use. I look forward to the much delayed android os release to breathe new life into my still prized device.
if only the phone was actually that shiny in real life...*sigh*
It's not a phone...
If only it WERE that shiny...
If only it was shiny and it's also a phone...
...and everything else, incuding the kitchen sink.
you bet its aiming for china's kirf market.
...and I'll wager even more that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
The Zii EGG is technologically far more capable than anything currently available in the DAP/PMP arena.
Let's see what Creative (one of the very 1st portable media player manufacturers) does with this technology... Looks promising so far.
@daharder
Not sure what youre trying to say or you seem to think im bashing creative when im not! Creative has a lot of potential, but they need to work on marketing, better craft their products to make them look a little more stylish, and they need work on the hardware, as people are complaining about load/boot times, and bugs.
you say creative makes the best dap/pmp... wrong! First, archos most earliest av series if you did your research killed any pmp that creative came out with back in same year the two companies came out with pmps. sure creative was first to come out with pmps, while other companys were a few months off, but they did a better job at it! Secondly, not to mention apple's ipod and sony's walkman line of DAPs have the best sound quality ever since they first came out!
China's KIRF market makes a kabillion devices with the iPhone/iPod as the foundation too. Imagine that!
In fact, they were resourceful enough to make an iPhone Nano that Apple themselves haven't quite managed to pull out of their hat yet.
Funnily enough, this; just like 99% of the other KIRFs, run on Win CE.
Ouch.
The Zii's purpose is to showcase the sheer strength and the capabilities of stem-cell computing. It's a great alternative to the other SoC solutions available these days. Creative's hopes are riding on licensing this tech to third parties and thus, competing with Qualcomm, TI, et al. Their own retail plans are frankly not as important as that.
The KIRF market has enough low-cost ARM based platforms available and I seriously doubt if they'd go through the pains to replicate an entirely new chipset. (That link about the Zii roadmap doesn't make any sense within the context of the article, btw. It IS Q4 2009 now).
Any average Joe who has been through a slow day at work or two knows this much by now. But apparently, smarmy gadget bloggers are above that.
Creative plans to make consumer devices out of it. Should be announced at CES 2010
http://www.mycreativefansite.com/2009/10/creative-to-bang-on-zii.html
Creative should just pack it in at this point.
What else can you say about a company that inexplicably disguised a hard-drive-based MP3 player as a Discman, released later players that required you to carry a CD of proprietary drivers around with it (and had no Mac support), and has since churned out nothing of interest. These guys practically invented the MP3-player market but lost it to Apple by simply producing idiotic products.
I dunno, I think the lack of a mass marketing budget that the iPod had at the time also has something to do with it. In my life time I have only see one Creative mp3 billboard, and I dunno how many billboards I've seen for the iPod. I have also see a few print ads, but that in computer magazines, not to mention I have never seen a tv ad from them.
I thought styling the Jukebox like a diskman was a clever move. There were no MP3 player cases at the time so your options were to make a device that fit into a walkman case or a device that fit into a diskman case.
In fairness, the Zen Micro was consistently rated on par with or superior to the iPod Mini before the Nano came along. The Zen Touch and Zen Photo were also very highly regarded. Everything went wrong when they abandoned the slider-bar interface. I have a newer Zen with the box of buttons, but it's just not the same. The GUI is great but the controls suck compared to my old Zen Micro Photo. It also doesn't help that they royally dropped the ball on the SD card expansion.
Flash Memory killed Creative.
If a portable product needs a case, then its vendor should provide one. The imitation-Discman styling was stupid because it was a bulky, unwieldy circle whereas the hard drive within was rectangular.
Creative had some promising-looking devices later, but they weren't recognized as drives when you plugged them into a USB port. Talk about a blunder. You had to install proprietary software on any computer to which you wanted to connect the player, and to top it off there was no Mac version. It's a portable device. You want to carry software around with it (but not on it)? Just astounding. Is this still true?
I heard this has GPS, HD video camera and playback, extensive codec support, SDHC slot along with massive internal memory and ofcourse multitouch screen. These are enough for me to forget about ipod touch completely. I mean, hell ! GPS on a pmp??
And the final device will cost around 200$-300$. I think even if it costs 350 it'll be a heck of a deal ! By the way please don't even mention the ipod's applications in reply to me, this has android so problem solved
Android, but without the android market
...the devs are doing exciting things everyday with the zii egg...
...and seemingly there are many more developers waiting in the wings for android...
...busy days ahead...
Uhm, considering it does 1080p playback (And recording too, I think...), I'd still call it quite "stellar news"...
It isn't too little...but is it to late?
This is going to be a great hit to our generation
I have one, its awesome .. well, I say that because I'm a developer, and I really like what CL is doing with the Plaszma OS - I hope that this gets some traction and not everyone boots Android on the thing, because frankly the Plaszma frameworks are really, really nice .. and FAST, too. So lets see if there is a chance for Plaszma-based apps .. I know I've got a few up my sleeves that I'll be releasing as soon as there are consumers out there with Plaszma based devices.
Android: sure, its welcome. But I'll not be running it on my Egg .. Plaszma is just *too* nice in the performance department by comparison, and frankly I'm a little bored of Android .. as a developer.
I really wish someone would at least confirm a real time-line for the consumer version, and personally I would like it to stay a PMP (/MID) and not a phone. I like my phone being small and cheap.
Hello people :) I was actually browsing the web on my Egg when I stumbled upon your thread :P I would like to say one thing about this device that may cause a bit of turbulance but I believe my fellow developers and true tech savy peeps will agree...This piece of hardware is Fn amazing! No it's not a consumer device, no it's not refined (Hence the "Developer Edition"), no you cant download apps like the "iTard". (You heard me Apple fanboys ;) It's NEW and it's revolutionary technology. I've been working in IT and CGI for over 20 years on every platform from the Amiga to Silicon Graphics and every x86 iteration in between:P One thing that got my attention immediatly is it's ability to push media, any media, like it has about $1000+ of cpu/gpu power. Until you've used it you can't really appreciate it. The fact that Andriod is finally being released to the Zii dev community us great for all the developers who dont have a grasp on C I suppose but letting Plaszma get set aside to push the Zii technology into the consumer market seems like a horrible idea. Plaszma is, as Jay Vaughan pointed out, is VERY fast and designed (not optimized) for the ZMS-05 processor.