Zii?

[Michael Butash]

I saw Creative's marketing videos released a few days ago and drooled...
Engadget had it right, it'd be dreamy if it were a phone, but otherwise
probably just another niche DMP behind the ubiquitous i(cky)pods people
seem to favor for no apparent reason than wanting to pay their apple
tax.  Sounds like Creative's Zii processor might be cool if they oem'd
their integrated solution to someone that wants to throw a baseband
radio in it for GSM/CDMA/LTE.  Otherwise it'll just be another footnote
competitor to apple's marketing machine.  Nothing quite like races to be
number 2, thanks apple. 

Sadly enough, the powerhouse DMP to probably beat for performance is
going to be the ZuneHD packing a NVidia Tegra chipset that can decode
full 1080p in hardware, but it's not a phone (yet) either.  I don't
think many, if any, other proprietary solutions will pack the video
capability it does.  Sadly NVidia pissed on linux by only supporting OEM
Windows CE/Mobile (ick) for Tegra, or at least until google or others
reverse engineer their hardware around them, which isn't likely.

I'm still holding out for Verizon to get off their laurels and release a
damn android phone with some quality hardware, preferably something to
double as a DMP.  I'm about at the point I'm looking at Sprint Pre's to
hack over to Verizon just for a (rootable) linux phone to toy with.
After one horrible experience after the next with windoze mobile phones,
I'll keep a simple dumbphone until then.

-mb


On Thu, 2009-07-30 at 14:30 -0700, Ryan Rix wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Has anyone ever heard of this thing?
> http://www.zii.com
> 
> apparently, it's God in mobile hardware form, but it just screams 
> vapourware to me...
> 
> Anyone with another opinion?
> 
> Ryan
> 
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