Exclusive Interview With Andrew Audsley of ZiiLABS

A few weeks ago, I sent a few interview questions to Andrew Audsley of ZiiLABS. Not having heard anything from him in thirteen days, I assumed it was a case of overworked PR not having the resources nor desire to respond to a small niche website. Boy, was I wrong! The day that the Zii EGG and Plaszma were launched by the company, I received an email with a full response. Lucky for me, as all of the questions I posed were probably going to be non-answers until the official release date. Most interesting to me was the response to the number of companies working with the ZMS-05, and a suggestion that a ZMS-05 product is coming soon from one of ZiiLABS’ partners. Click through to read the interview!

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.

CNET Asia- Hands-on with the Creative Zii Egg

HardwareZone- Preview- Creative Zii Egg

http://asia.cnet.com/i/08/tv/flash/proteus.swf

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.

epiZENter

Engadget

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 Touchscreen ZEN (aka Zii Egg) Arrives!

We’ve been waiting for aeons, it seems like, for Creative to release its true competitor to the iPod Touch and worthy successor to the ZEN Vision:M. And boy, does it look like they have delivered a doozy. While the specifics are sketchy at best, the new Zii Egg is a touchscreen MP4 player with the new Zii processor at its heart. Why is the processor so important? Because not too long ago, Creative demonstrated the high definition playback and Android capabilites of the chip, two extremely cool things. Also, there’s a high definition camera on the front (presumably extremely similar to the Vado HD’s), and wireless functionality.

Read our full writeup over at the Creative blog.

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:
http://www.cnet.com/av/video/flv/universalPlayer/universalSmall.swf