Once being the world dominant sound processor manufacturer Creative has lost much of its past glory. The company has not succeeded in reclaiming the sound card market and its remaining assortment hasn’t impressed much over the last few years, in spite of its good width. In December last year we found out that Creative would form a new company together with its subsidiary 3DLabs, Zii Labs. The first product was a System-on-a-Chip solution called ZMS-05 and it has now launched the first media player using the chip, Creative Zii Egg.
The player is, as is customary at the time, equipped with a large 3.5″ LCD with multi-touch technology and 320×480 pixel resolution. It comes with 32GB integrated memory, which can be further expanded through, up to 32GB, SDHC memory cards.
The powerful ZMS-05 processor can play High Definition video with 1080p resolution and the audio is handled by an integrated X-Fi processor. Except from support for various audio and video formats, Creative has installed functions like GPS, accelerometer, two cameras, and Bluetooth and WiFi for networking.
All this in a 115 x 62 x 12mm format weighing only 108g. Creative markets the play as a StemCell computer and it comes with an open source operating system called Plaszma OS. Zii Egg also supports Android, which leaves doors wide open for other software developers.
Zii Egg looks like a potent iPod challenger with a starting price of around $200 (without integrated storage). More information on Zii Egg can be found at Zii.com.
