Tattu Mobile, a UK-based company that specializes in designing mobile handsets and related accessories, is reportedly developing an Android tablet with telephony. Intrisync Software International will provide the telephony technology. According to the source, the tablet will be based on ZiiLabs’ powerful ZMS-05 processor. The ZMS-05 processor by ZiiLABS is a high-performance, low-power consuming chipset designed for media-rich applications. We sure can’t wait for more pictures and details on what this Zii-powered Android tablet can do.

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via The Explosm Fora – View Single Post – Fan Art.

Posted via email from ziichannel

# The Shanghai World Expo is the largest in the history of international exhibitions. Fair grounds span 5.28 square kilometers—roughly the equivalent of 990 football fields. 

# Over 50 international organizations and almost 200 countries are participating in the Shanghai World Expo.

# China is reportedly spending 28.6 billion yuan ($4.2 billion) on the Shanghai Expo itself, plus billions more on improvements for the hosting city. 

# An estimated 70 million visitors are expected at the Expo. 

# Over 600,000 tickets were sold by Day 6 of the Expo 

# Held in the center of Shanghai at the Nanpu Bridge-Lupu Bridge region, the Expo will run from May 1 to October 2010. 

# In line with its theme "Better City – Better Life", only zero-carbon emission vehicles are allowed on Expo grounds. 

# The pavilions are powered by the world’s largest “eco wall”, made up of a network of rooftop solar panels. 

# There are five main themed pavilions at the Expo, each focusing on a different aspect of urban living. They are: Urban Footprints, Urban Dreams, Urban Beings, Urban Planets. Creative Technology’s booth is located in the Urban Dreams Pavilion. Read more about it here: http://www.zii.com/Expo2010/Welcome.aspx  

# One of the Expo’s key attractions is the Zero-Carbon Hall, which features a zero-carbon restaurant that burns leftover food for electricity.  

Posted via email from ziirocks.posterous.com

QUOTE: “Although much of the content will, in fact, be free, RS plans to charge a fee for full access to all content new and old: $3.95 per month or $2.50 dollars per month with a year’s subscription, according to AFP.”

Seems like a sensible, consumer-friendly move on the part of an old, established zine like Rolling Stone.  Stayin’ aliiiiive in the era of tweets and blog posts.

QUOTE: The key to enjoying instant noodles every day is simple: “It’s to eat while possessing a feeling of happiness.” Yamamoto can conjure up this feeling by reminding himself of the universality of instant ramen. “When I think about all the people even on the opposite end of the globe who are eating instant noodles at the same time as me, it really makes me feel connected beyond borders,” he says.

You’ve just got to love the Internets and how it makes it possible for weird finds like that to exist. And of course, one has to love Boing Boing.

This sampler-like plan comes with: 200MB ZiiDisk storage, unlimited video calls and cheap outgoing calls from $0.021/min. Like we’ve mentioned, 200MB of storage is not a lot to shout about, but use it to get a feel of ZiiDisk.  As tried and tested, it’s easy to use and shows promise as an alternative to current online storage/file sharing services. Presumably, ZiiLifers will be able to upgrade from this starter plan to meatier service plans with bigger ZiiDisk storage options. The question is when.

For now, the other ZiiLife service you’ll want to tinker around with is ZiiMeet.

For an IM/VOIP call application that sets itself up as a Skype competitor, ZiiMeet is none too shabby. For one, you can import your IM contacts from Yahoo, MSN and AIM (we wonder why not Googletalk…hmm). And $0.021/min for landline calls (and mobile phones for selected countries) to 28 countries is pretty decent. Skype’s outgoing call rates start from 0.017 Euros/min. So yes, very competitive pricing there.

Me, I’ve been using ZiiMeet for the past four months and it’s replaced MSN as my primary IM application. So far, so good. Updates are rolled out pretty frequently too.

Now before you get all excited, ZiiMeet is only for PCs – for now. So if you’re using a Mac, you’ll have to hang in there till Creative rolls out a Mac-version of ZiiMeet. Also, you need to sign up for ZiiLife before you can download ZiiMeet.

Key new features:

* Front-facing video chat camera
* improved back camera – WITH FLASH
* Split volume buttons – possibly to double as camera shutter buttons
* Everything is more squared off, like the current line of iMacs, and of course, the iPad
* improved display
* Micro SIM card
* metallic power, mute and volume buttons

The Gizmodo verdict:  ”It has the same feeling, the same functional simplicity.”

And lest we forget, it will be running iPhone OS 4.0 (apparently the jailbreak solution is already out), which means, THERE WILL BE MULTI-TASKING. Roll on, June.

ZiiDisk is one of three components that make up ZiiLife, which includes a VOIP telephony service ZiiMeet and ZiiJournal—a customizable online photo gallery.

To try out ZiiDisk, you need to sign up for an account at www.ziilife.com. ZiiLife is out of the private beta phase, so anybody can sign up and give it a go. 200MB is not a lot to work with (for now it’s the default storage amount you get when you sign up for a ZiiLife account), but it’s enough for a test drive.

When you click on ZiiDisk, the first thing you see are several default folders labeled music, movies, documents, backups, etc. So there’s a step saved when you want to upload files to folders. For the not-so-tech-savvy, this is a good instructional cue to what they are supposed to do with ZiiDisk.

Upload any type of file
As with DropBox and other online file storage services, ZiiDisk lets you upload any type of file: Word documents, PDFs, mp3s, images, movie files, etc. Previewing an image is straightforward. A single click launches the image (a slight delay here though), along with the options to rotate the image; zoom in and out and navigate to other pictures in the folder.

Upload multiple files at once

With many online file storage services, uploading files is slow and cumbersome, because you have to upload files one, by one. Zzzzz. By comparison, with ZiiDisk, you get to upload a bunch of files at once —very zippy, very, very good. On one occasion I uploaded several images (of about 1MB each); and on another six mp3s at once. Both were impressively quick and fuss-free affairs. That said, stick with Internet Explorer—the uploading process tends freeze up other browsers, unfortunately.

Picture uploads show up on ZiiJournal!
This is a neat one. When you upload jpegs, gifs, bmps—any type of image file, they show up instantly on ZiiJournal. Where you will go ooooh, is when you see that all the pictures have been automatically sorted by the dates they were taken.

It’s all a right click away

Anything you need to do with your files— cut, delete, share, edit properties— is only a right-click away. That’s primarily how you work your way around in ZiiDisk—and it’s the key reason it’s easy to use, especially for newbies.

Instant file sharing
What’s very likeable about file sharing on ZiiDisk is how instant the experience is. Once the recipient clicks on the download link in the e-mail, he is directed to the web page where the file is hosted and download begins automatically.

For now, just two gripes. What I’d like to see is Creative offering space upgrade options for ZiiDisk and to fix the browser compatibility issue. Up next tomorrow:  ZiiMeet.

OKOK I have to digress a little here and point you to this comic strip:
http://www.pidjin.net/2010/01/25/iwish/

HURHUR. Duke Nukem.

It is understandable why everyone’s all a-jitter about this new product from Apple. All the tablets that have come and gone before have, to put simply, sucked. The Apple tablet gives us great hope that it might break that bad spell, given its sterling reputation with consumer electronics. Does anyone still remember Windows XP Tablet PC? Anyone? Well, PC World reckons tablets will sell big in 2010. They could be right—if history repeats itself with the Apple Tablet as it did with the iPhone in 2007.

This brings me to Trendspotting blog’s prediction. They say 2010 will see the rise of the e-book reader. Along with that, the emergence of books as the new It content category. I can see the latter happening, not so much e-book readers. Not if they are going to be variations of Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle, is created purely for reading—and only in black and white, no less. You cannot input information, nor can you surf the internet. You can, however, carry 1,500 – 3,000 books in your bag.

book vs. e-book reader

When it comes to reading for pleasure, I’m old school. I like to finger the pages, flip, pause, re-read passages. Most of all, I love to smell my books. It’s a whole tactile experience. And smell, as we know is a significant memory trigger. There’s roundedness and depth in the experience of reading a real book. MUCH more than swishing, pinching and flicking a screen.

But back to features of the e-book. If its sole purpose on earth is to display text, I say fugeddaboutit. A device like that will go the way of the portable DVD player. Fast. Remember that dud invention?

now i can watch movies on the go!

We are, I believe, in the advanced internet age.

OF course, not all e-books are walking that way.

Creative’s MediaBook touts internet browsing, video and photo playback, text-to-speech functionality and a full color screen. A media-rich e-book reader. Until it comes out, we won’t know how it will perform next to Kindle and the other e-book readers. But with full color, video and internet browsing—it cannot be a bad thing.

People will realize color beats black-and-white (duh), but this also blurs the distinction between e-book reader and tablet. Why buy a tablet-like gadget with limited features, when you can get a full-featured tablet? Who wouldn’t get a tablet if they could?

Unless like me, you too like banging on a real keyboard.

bangbangbangbangbang!