Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Creative Zii Egg Plaszma: Android-Wielding iPod Touch [PMP]

Creative Zii Egg Plaszma: Android-Wielding iPod Touch [PMP]

Spotted in a recent FCC filing, the now-revealed Creative Zii Egg Plaszma boasts some of the world's first "flexible StemCell architecture" that uses 24 floating-point processors. But you may care more because it's basically an open source iPod Touch.

Being seeded to developers as part of a $399 SDK (final units are expected to ship in bulk at $199), the Zii Egg Plaszma is an Android-friendly "handheld computer" that's like an iPod touch beefed up with more than a few popular requests.

You navigate the platform through a 3.5" 320x480, 10-point capacitive multitouch screen. From there, you can access the rear facing HD video camera, front facing live chat VGA camera, 32GB of integrated storage with SDHC card expansion, Flash Lite support, GPS, Wi-Fi and, oh right, it's powerful enough to output 1080P video.

Of course, its greatest asset, the option to run the open Android OS (the company offers its own Plaszma OS but that's a bit less exciting), means that the hardware begins to resemble a smartphone without the phone. And I'm surprised on a daily basis that anyone is still buying big iPods that can't make phone calls. [ZiiLabs via GeekyGadgets]