Creative unveils Android-based iPod touch rival

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Jos

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A filing with the FCC last month offered some evidence that Creative had a new touch screen portable media player in the works. Named after the system-on-a-chip processor the company showed off during CES 2009, the Zii Egg has been officially unearthed today and its feature set actually shows promise.

Clearly envisioned as a competitor to the iPod touch and Zune HD, the Android-based device can reportedly output 1080p video, run 3D apps written in OpenGL ES, and supports Flash Lite. The handheld features a 3.5-inch 480x320 multi-touch display, 32GB of internal memory and a full-sized SD card slot, two cameras (an HD video camera on the back and a VGA camera on the front for video chat), Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, a GPS, X-Fi audio processing, an accelerometer, a light sensor, a speaker, and a microphone.

Interestingly, though, we may never actually see the Zii Egg released to consumers as an official Creative product. At least for now the company is looking to sell it directly to other manufacturers as an OEM product so they can re-brand the device and sell it as their own – possibly even adding 3G capabilities.

Creative is currently bundling the Zii Egg with its Plaszma development kit for $399; however the device alone will eventually be available priced as low as $199 if bought in bulk. You can find a video of the device in action after the jump.

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hmmm.... Looks quite like an iPhone clone... What i want to know now is how well it performs... Creative's software department has always had an issue. Older Creative MP3 Players were awesome, only with 1 flaw, they crashed like no tomorrow. >_>

I own a Sandisk Sansa e200 series myself and my cousin owns the Creative X-Fi, latest gen. I gotta say that i still love my Sansa more even after comparing audio quality with the X-Fi...

Creative better had something good if they plan on prying my beloved Sansa out of my hands, as only replacement i have in mind now would be the Cowon S9...
 
I wonder if the SD slot accepts SDHC cards? While this looks awesome, and I do like the dual cameras, I'm still holding out for the Nvidia Tegra.
 
I'm actually concerned with the performance of the device. During the demo there quite a few times where things weren't smooth, I don't know if it's the hardware or the software but this is a major problem. If it feels sluggish and unresponsive then it's gonna fail and personally I wasn't impressed at all.
 
I have also read that this has been released to soon and that the performance has been unresponsive
 
red1776 said:
I have also read that this has been released to soon and that the performance has been unresponsive


This isn't really a major concern as it is being released with a dev kit to begin with. Problems like this are almost always resolved by firmware updates.
 
I'm amazed to see "after the jump" still being used. Isn't that rather gauche?
 
looks better than the ipod touch, but the only difference is apple makes millions apps for itouch
 
based on the features list it seems that this device is able to do everything.. sd/sdhc supported great! now is only to wait for a working one from the developers
 
What's nice about this device is it supports two separate OS's. Creative's own Plazma OS which is what the SDK supports that Creative is selling with the unit, and supports Android so there are already a bunch of apps already available for it. The 10-point multi-touch screen also looks really interesting. The full size SDHC slot is also nice, up to 64GB available memory.
 
If it had an oled screen and an HD Radio Tuner, I'd get it for sure. But without those things, I don't know. I looks nice and has a few better features than the Zune HD, but I wouldn't buy one without those two things.
 
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