What if a Kindle rival could display videos and do Facebook and Twitter while also offering a touch screen, text to speech, an SD memory slot and Internet capabilities? Those are among the features of the Creative Zii MediaBook—and get this: the company has just displayed a working model. Breaking the news, complete with the apparently Photoshopped image to the left, was EpiZENter.net, which also reports use of the Zii-System-on-a-Chip technology
Ten publishers are said to be in talks with Creative, whose new baby can display newspapers and magazines, as well as textbooks and, of course, educational multimedia. Significantly Creative is a partner in the Singapore government’s FutureBooks initiative. A bit of a TeleRead going on over there? Tech in Hiding says: “By teaming up with the Singapore government, it allows the company to fund much of the production. It’s similar to how the US defense industry works—the government gives money to Lockheed Martin (or similar) to build new fighter jets. The government will still end up paying for the jet, but the company can also sell to other partners- Canada, UK, Germany, etc.” See a Techmeme roundup for more details on the MediaBook.
In other hardware news:
–Another gizmo to watch is the Motorola Droid Smartphone, lovingly drooled over in MobileCrunch, with specs already laid out in Wikipedia (carrying the photo to the right). Yep, that’s a real, live keyboard. The touch screen is 3.7 inches, slightly larger than the iPhone’s, and has 854 X 480 resolution. Other features include a five-megapixel camera. Initial price with a contract is supposed to be $199. The intro date is November 6; a Droid site is up and poking fun at the closed “iDon’t.” The OS is Android, of course, and you already know about some app possibilities. Meanwhile here’s a list of Android devices.
–The Nook may go global, if you extrapolate from Barnes and Noble’s search for “head of their international business” (Techcrunch via Kindle Review, which wonders if the Kindle 3 will have WiFi capabilities to help get around steep wireless charges in various countries).
There’s also wireless news—the possibility of free Kindle-style wireless for Nintendo owners.
Related: italica e-Reader joins the family, in MobileRead.
The Creative MediaBook is a good development but frankly there’s a bit less there than meets the eye.
First, of course, is the fact that the news is just a statement of intent; Creative intends to do something in the ebook space sometime in the near future.
Second, is that the device, much like the Apple tablet, will not be an ebook reader that plays media files but rather a media player that displays ebooks. Screen will doubtlessly be color; LCD or Oled, battery life will be limited compared to eink readers. Pricing may end up dangerously close to the tablet/netbook space now inhabited by the Archos 9 and other UMPCs and aspiring webpads. Going to get crowded in that area next year.
If you look at the Creative Zii effort it becomes clear that Creative has committed a lot of resources to their Zii processor but is coming a tad late to the party; NVIDIA’s comparable Tegra is already out and selling in volume in the ZUNE HD and moving to a range of cellphones next year. Their flagship Egg media player is stalled on the launching pad and starting to look dated, hardware-wise.
In that context, the ebook announcement looks more like a fallback or redirection than a foreward-thinking move. They are scrambling to make something out of the Zii investment.
Which is good; they do have good hardware designers, it’ll likely bring new ideas to market. But Creative Media Players have generally suffered on the software side, with minor but annoying flaws. So software is going to be a big issue and content availability, outside their home market, is going to be a sticking point.
eBooks are not like music or video; consumers can’t really generate their own out of existing delivery channels so the content delivery pattners are going to be critical and, in the past, Creative products have had issues working with content partners (the likes of Napster and Rhapsody).
Competition is good, diversity is good, but Creative faces a steep climb here.
@ Felix: the Archos 9 has a $499 price tag, but a smartbook (ARM-powered netbook) with a 10″ screen can retail for $199. If Creative goes with a 7″ screen, or 8″, they might well undercut that.
In other points, I agree with you: this is basically a company with a solution in search of a problem. They have the Zii, and they want people to buy Zii’s and build products around them; failing in this, Creative must make the products themselves. So, how about a media player or ebook reader? ‘Yeah, we can do that!’
By next spring, we may well be flooded with ARM Cortex-8 based slates and smartbooks; the Cortex-8 is more powerful than the Zii; next fall or spring 2011 we will start seeing Cortex-9 based devices.
A lot of wonderful choices will be coming for ebook reading devices. The future looks good. I do hope Creative can compete with the Zii-platform as well — the more the merrier1
No disagreement, but the Archos is a full personal computer *and* it has a touchscreen. Cortext-based smartbooks might hit $199 with 10in screens and SSDs but I don’t think the slate versions with touch will go that low out of the gate.
One of the virtues of an x86 slate like the Archos is universal book compatibility regardless of DRM; Adobe, Kindle, Mobi, eReader and Lit. And for educational users, access to content generation apps and journaling and note-taking apps like OneNote. That’s a lot of functionality for a sub 2-lb device.
Still it is pretty clear that come 2010, eink will *not* be the only path to ebook readers, especially for the textbook market where features will matter more than price. the enabling tech is in place now; all this needed is for the hardware guys to step up.
It is still early in the game; the fun stuff is yet to come.