Today my Zii EGG arrived. Well, technically i had to drive 45 minutes to the FedEx shipping center to pick it up because no one was home to sign, but that's not important.
What is important is this:
I opened it up and the first thing I noticed was the small plastic tab at the bottom sticking out from under the device.
When you flip it over it says "Please Remove". How polite. While looking at the plastic tab after i removed it I noticed what looked like a small security device, similar to the one's included in retail packaging to help prevent theft. I wonder why they would includ that in their manufacturing and packaging process if the Zii EGG isn't intended to retail? The packaging certainly looked nice enough for retail. Nice and clean, easy to open. I think it would fit nicely on a retail shelf. And many people have noted that the FCC listing stated two devices, a Zii and a Zii EGG. Perhaps Creative has stronger intentions of selling one under their own brand after all. I think it would be a lot of trouble to package a unit like this to send to an ODM or even an OEM that would have to open it up, take the plastic off, load their software and re-package it. But this is all just speculation. Only Creative knows what they have planned.
Let us venture onward with the exploration of the EGG.
This is the home screen. Right now it only has a few options. Mainly due to the SDK still being fully developed. If you look at the road map for the SDK you'll see some features aren't even expected to be ready before Q4 this year. And I'm sure there will be enhancements coming after that as well.
Many users on the ZiiLabs forum have stated problems with this screen. That when they try to use it to unlock the Zii EGG it freezes and the only way to get back to the menu is with a hard reset. I personnally haven't had this problem. It's worked for me unlocking no matter if i woke it up with the power button, camera button, or the home button.
Here's the information displayed when you go to the Opera browser's about section. You can see both the build and version of the Linux-based Plaszma OS and the Opera browser running on it.
This next image shows the paths Opera uses for it's preferences, plug-ins, etc.
Ok, now for my initial impressions. The touch is a little buggy. It doesn't seem to pick up on some of my touches and a few of the controls are a little hard to use, zoom for one. Going between applications seems a little slow. It lags briefly when going from the home page to any of the apps, although once in the apps it operates relatively smooth. The gesture based system isn't implemented yet so only basic functionality is there. You can slide left to right to navigate between photo's but you can't use two fingers to zoom in and out...yet. The video playback is pretty smooth as well. I noticed a couple slight hick-ups when playing "Elephant's Dream", the HD 10 minute clip included, but they were very brief and hardly noticeable. The video looks nice and crisp, although the internal speaker when playing video's doesn't seem quite load enough. When playing music it seems fine though, so it may just be the film.
The screen seems to be prone to smudges and finger oil, but it doesn't interfere with viewing the screen at all. It's very bright and crisp and that was just on about 85% brightness. When i turned it all the way up I immediately turned it back down again. I don't think anyone would ever need to use it's full brightness.
The home button is on the bottom edge of the screen and goes all the way across the bottom, not just a small button like I thought it was going to be. To the right is the camera button and the SD slot. On the front to the right appears to be the small microphone hole. To the top, right/center is the front facing camera, and on the top to the left is the power button. Opposite the power button on the back is the HD camera.
I was able to connect to my WPA2 encrypted network with absolutely no problems and it connected right away. Scrolling on the WiFI network details page seems a little bit difficult. I'm not sure if that's due to there being numerous text boxes to accept your input or if there's some other issue with it not recognizing the scrolling gesture on that page. Regardless, WiFi seems to be working flawlessly.
Transfering files with the Zii EGG Explorer software provided on ZiiLabs works well. I've had no problems transfering several hundred photo's to the device.
Looking into the files on the device from the Zii Egg Explorer reveals an xml file under the Data directory. Inside this DeviceInfo.xml is the information about the device's screen resolution and output resolution, as well as several profiles it has.
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
- <DeviceInfo>
- <Creative display="320x480" tvout="1920x1080">
- <!-- Hints for various profiles -->
<Profile vcodec="WMV3" level="MP@ML" />
<Profile vcodec="avc1" level="MP" />
<Profile vcodec="H264" level="MP" />
<Profile vcodec="davc" level="MP" />
<Profile vcodec="LMP4" level="MP" />
<Profile vcodec="SVQ3" level="MP" />
<Profile vcodec="X264" level="MP" />
</Creative>
</DeviceInfo>
Overall, I'm impressed and think it was well worth it. I've also managed to get the SDK and Plaszma tools installed without a problem and will attempt to construct a small application to test it out soon. My review and impressions of that will be coming shortly.
