Video: Creative displaying ZiiO multimediap tablets

 Creative held a press event earlier this week to show some of its latest multimedia creations and one of the products it wanted to emphasize was a coming tablet of the ZiiO family where the focus is on multimedia and audio, in the spirit of Creative.

Creative ZiiO 7 and ZiiO 10 are two Android-based multimedia tablets that beside a resistive touch screen has the in-house X-Fi sound processor for best possible sound quality. Creative was a giant on the sound card market, but now sees a bright future in the wireless market and the company showed how you can easily and conveniently switch between different wireless bluetooth speakers and headsets with the new ZiiO tablets.

By pairing the media tablet with e.g. a bluetooth speaker or a bluetooth headset you can choose through a few clicks which device the audio should be sent to. This was demonstrated during the presentation and is called Pure Android Audio. The transfer of audio during video playback on ZiiO to Creative’s new ZiiSound T6 bluetooth speaker worked excellent and with good quality, as far as we could hear, no delays either.

Creative ZiiO has support for X-Fi Crystalizer that the powerful sound processor for optimized sound quality depending on the media you play, according to your own preferences. While an apt-X audio codec will result in best possible audio quality over the wireless Bluetooth technology. These large tablets are still very much tablets in their hearts.

Beside support for most audio and video formats in the multimedia units you can also play High Definition video to external monitors through a mini-HDMI output. ZiiO 10 supports playback of 1080p video, while little brother Ziio 7 settles for 720p .

Creative going down the right track

We got some time with the new devices and the first impressions were mixed. I presonally appreciate Creative’s venture with wireless multimedia tablets.

Controlling your music or movies on a relatively large touchscreen feels pretty alluring. At the party you can load your Spotify applications and send your tablet around, or bring it out to thge kitchen and control the music in the livingroom without having to see TV, stereo or IR receiver.

Creative’s idea is to go wireless – imagine a pair of bluetooth speakers or headset and a portable tablet – it feels fitting for both its expert knowledge and for tablets as a whole, but even if it is heading in the right direction there are things it has to solve before it has a complete product.

Resistive touch technology and different panels

Creative has chosen to use resistive touch technology in its ZiiO tablets and the reason is that it is developing software that can regognize pencil movement, which doesn’t work with the more exact capacitive touch technology. During the minutes we had we concluded that using just your fingers worked well and that the panel was very responsive for being a resistive model.

There are still noticeable differences with a capacitive touch screen and we question if the need to write is as large as Creative says. We had sooner seen a more responsive display and continued focus on the multimedia functions. Software for converting handwriting to digital text is in development, but currently only works with Chinese.

Creative belives in handwritten notes on tablet, we not so much.

Before we leave the displays we can conclude that the 7″ panel that ZiiO 7 uses is better of the two. ZiiO 7 had considerably better viewing angles and will according to Creative’s specifications support 16.7 million colors, unlike the 262,000 colors in the 10″ panel. Something Creative’s representatives thought was odd and could not confirm.

Overall the 7″ unit feels like the more interesting of the two. Why the same 1 GHz ZMS-08 CPU can’t handle 1080p playback like big brother we did not get an answer to, bu instead we get a better display – even if the blackness and resolution wasn’t the best – an an overall more convenient design.

Good functions and attractive price

Creative’s ZiiO family did not give us the premium feel we were looking for and even though they did not feel cheap they are hardly high-end. If we look to the features Creative has done well. It emphasizes the multimedia functions and we also find other nice functions are memory card reader, mini-HDMI, mini-USB and a VGA camera.

Creative ZiiO 10

The most positive is clearly the prices that start at 250€ and 290€ for ZiiO 7 and ZiiO10 respectively with 8GB storage. In other words a fraction of what Samsung or Apple ask for their tablets.

Creative ZiiO lacks 3G support and is no tablet to carry around outside, but if Creative can sign a deal with Google it might be able to create its own exciting product category at Android market. Today you will have to settle for Creative’s own app store and even if it has found most of the applications, even those outside Android Market, it would raise usability considerability.

Without having tested a retail sample of Creative ZiiO we look forward to the sound company’s new multimedia tablets, not the least when they have matured a generation or two. Already in December we will see ZiiO 10 on the shelves and shortly afterwards lillebror ZiiO 7 will appear. An upgrade to Android 2.2 is coming says Creative.