Finally, Creative has confirmed that Zii EGG will ship by the end of this month. The Zii EGG runs “Plazma” platform which is the new and has something to do with “StemCell Computing” and enables developers to develop for both Android and Plazma simultaneously.
The Zii EGG is aimed at OEMs and developers; on top of Creative’s ZMS-05 chip, it runs good vanilla Android. In this, the hardware is very impressive, with rear and front facing cameras, 1080p video output, HD playback, OpenGL ES support, 32GB of built-in memory, X-Fi audio processing and a full SD slot. And much more “run of the mill” features are GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and a 3-axis accelerometer. The 320 x 480 screen sounds ordinary, but is some 10-point multi touch capacitive input on top.
Here, the main drawback is the lack of cellular data but I hope somebody will solve this problem. The Zii EGG is no doubt a developer platform but Creative said that this platform is “market-ready” for picking up for production by OEMs. I think they are not far removed from shoehorning a 3G chipset in there somewhere also. The Zii Plazma Starter Kit has the Zii EGG that can be had for $400.
Although the Zii EGG is a finished product but still it is not quite ready for the consumer market but expected to ship by the end of this month. Creative is banking on developers to build the applications and full user experiences out of the Zii EGG hardware though Android and their own Linux based OS dubbed Plazma. The big difference is that the Plazma OS takes advantage of the Zii chips cell architecture.
The Zii Egg that runs Google’s Android operating system is a multi touch iPod touch-like device. Though, the device bears a strong resemblance to the leaked bezel images and suggesting that it had simply been mislabeled all along.
So, you just wait till the end of this month and see the result.
