ZiiLabs – the combination of 3DLabs and the digital entertainment group of Creative Technology – has entered the smartphone market. ZiiLabs announced the Zii Trinity, what the company calls a “3.5G/4G” smartphone platform that can be licensed by other OEMs.
Zii’s Trinity smart/media phone platform is for the Android and Plaszma operating system. The platform is a complete 3.5G/4G smartphone development platform supporting optimized Android and Linux-based Plaszma OS.
What sets the ZiiLabs products apart is that they use the company’s own application processor; in this case, the older ZMS-05 processor, with two ARM9 cores onboard, and the newer ZMS-08 applications processor. That, in turn, allows 720p decoding and encoding, and a 1080p encoder for televisions, video output and acceleration of 3D graphics.
The Trinity also serves as a dual-boot phone, capable of running either an “optimized” Android OS or ZiiLabs’ native Linux-based Plaszma OS. ZiiLabs announced the phone at its Zii Summit in China, and did not release photos of the device. According to a statement, however, the Zii Trinity is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone also capable of tri-band WCDMA, HSDPA. ZiiLabs promises WiMAX and LTE capability in the future.
Naturally, given the legacy of 3DLabs’ graphics expertise, OpenGL ES 3D graphics have been built in and power the 3.1-inch 480 x 800 16M color active-matrix OLED display with capacitative multi-touch input. A mini HDMI port allows the phone to drive an HDTV or other display, and microSD and 802.11b/g Bluetooth EDR provide connectivity. The phone includes two cameras: a 5-Mpixel rear-facing, autofocus camera and a front-facing VGA camera for videoconferencing. Inside the phone is 256 Mbytes of RAM, a hardware GPS unit, and a 1130 mAH lithium-ion battery.
Memory expansion is via microSD cards and the device has 256MB of internal memory.
The ZiiLab Trinity 3G/4G Media/Phone Platform should see the light of day in some larger phone manufacturers, given this sophisticated design and timely announcement of this new platform.(www.ziilabs.com)
