We Have Our First Review

Member Prototype0 in our forums has received his EGG- below are his impressions.
I preordered and received my Zii Egg 2 days ago.  My first impression is not favorable but being a developer edition (ie beta hardware) it could be worse.  It came in very professional black and white packaging that was well organized and easy to unpackage.

First thing I noticed when powering the Egg on for the first time is that there appear to be a couple of dead pixels or screen defects (very small).  Pretty common on these types of devices (I also have a PSP that has a dead pixel) so no gripe there.  My real concern started when I did the “slide to unlock”.  The responsiveness is not quite what I expected.  In fact, I could do the “slide to unlock” next to the area where you are supposed to (next to the Z) and it slides.  So either its designed that way or the accuracy of the screen needs tweaking.

I should mention that I also have an iPod Touch 2g so I am making a comparison to the responsiveness of that device.  It is probably unfair to make such a comparison given the young age of tyhe Zii and Plaszma OS.

The next thing I tried was connecting it to my wireless LAN.  There currently is no way to configure a custom SSID / Security.  You can only connect to SSIDs that are broadcast and available in the list (unless I am missing something?).  Once connected, I launched Opera which took a couple of seconds to load (more responsiveness issues).  Again, making the comparison to the iPod Touch 2g the browser is noticeable slower.  It also lacks the 2 finger zoom functions of the Safari browser on the Touch.  Instead there is a + and – on the screen that you tap to zoom in and out.

Next I moved on to media.  First came video.  I played the demo videos and they look fantastic on this screen.  Much more impressive than the Touch.  The real pain came when I tried to copy a file to the Egg.  a 6GB MKV file took about 2.5 hours to copy over.  Something isnt quite right there.  When the file was finally copied over, I found that it was unplayable on the Egg (codecs coming in Sept).  So I then copied over a couple of files that I had formatted for the Touch.  Again, the copy process took longer than expected but not as painful because these files were about 200mb each.  The videos played with no problem and looked crisp and smooth.

Next was music.  I copied over some MP3s (again the copy process took longer than expected).  I launched the Music player (took about 4 secs to start) and all my songs were there with album art and all.  The sound quality is fanctastic.  I dont know if it’s the headphones on the x-fi processor but sound on this thing is noticeably better than on the Touch.

I was disappointed to find that a lot of features are missing right now (coming Q4) like the camera.  But I am sure firmware updates are on their way.

I guess this is what is to be expected of the device- it’s a beta product (not in the Google sense, but a real beta sense) that is a good foundation. But what Creative does here can be something really cool or half bake it and catastrophically fail on the software side. I hope it’s the former. Have you received yours? Is your experience similar?