ziiegg impressions
my zii egg arrived yesterday and here's my first recon of the device. due to limited chances to dig deeper* it will be focused entirely on
power efficiency
the most power-demanding task i could run on the device since its first full battery charge last night, was video playback. for the purpose i used one of the two demo flicks, 'elephant's dream' (a really nice open project short-film production) of resolution 1280x720p, and duration 10:53. i played that back 6 times, to a battery meter drop of 50% (2/4 bars). i belive it's safe to extrapolate from that that the device can playback 720p video for at least 2h straight. in the course of the playback, the device's back got slightly warm, but nowhere near what an ipod touch 2g gets under similar tasks.
so these are the dry facts. the more i thought of those, though, the more my respect for the 3dlabs guys grew. bear with me:
the device's video playback is achieved not through some specialized codec silicon, but through GP stream processing. that is, in the same way my desktops decode video. the funny thing, though, is that zii is actually better at that task than one of my desktops - a 1.25GHz altivec-wielding ppc, which reaches its performance limit at 720p; under VLC (the fastes player i've come across on that desktop) it already tends to drop frames at that resolution and 30Hz framerate. not the zii, though - its 720p is butter-smooth. with superb down-scaling to its native 480x320.
the implications?
i have a device fitting in my pocket, which device outperforms my everyday desktop (15-30W) in one particular GP streaming class of tasks, without the use of dedicated silicon. and said device can do that for more than 2h on a single battery charge. and by virtue of GP, i, too, can make use of that compuational power for my own purposes.
wow.
i don't know about you, but that makes me glee like a schoolgirl. if i were at nasa i'd be stock-piling zms chips by racks as we speak.
seriously, though, as you can see i'm deeply impressed so far. i hope to be able to give you my impressions from the sdk next.
* my zii sdk installation was bogged down by a persistent problem with ubuntu hardy's networking under parallels on my mac mini. it's a known issue involving wifi, parallels and ubuntu. i plant to revert to wire tonight and continue with the sdk installation.