Creative's Zen masters art of girls in bikinis

I'M NOT exactly an iDiot longing for an iPod or queing overnight for an iPhone - even though I did play with an i486 in my younger days - but, being here in Singapore, I couldn't miss Creative's launch of yet another iPod competitor, the newest Zen video multimedia play gadget, whose news release we covered earlier today.

Creative hosted the event in a boutique downtown geek outlet with "models" showing the thingie hanging off local flavours of athletic 'studs' and bikini gals alike, as shown on the photo.

Like, er, what's exactly the point here?

I had a few minutes spare to play with the credit card sized device during the launch - yeah, it is cute, small, slim, lightweight and can fit into a (fat) wallet. I could barely feel this miniaturisation marvel in my palm, which also means it's easy to lose if you can't feel its weight 'missing'. The 2.5-inch screen size is only matched by iPods twice as large, by the way. Anyway, at least to me, watching a movie on anything less than, say, a 12-inch notebook screen is a waste of time and, worse yet, eyesight.

The gadget's got the capacity - 8 GB, soon to be 16 GB built in, plus whatever your extra SD-HC cards will fit in, and could play quite a few things. The iTunes Plus is a nice add on, and I do agree that the display was good for this kind of device. I felt the buttons could be a bit more responsive, though.

You can expect to spend around 200 quid in Blighty for the 16 GB version, though it will be cheaper in Sin-Galore at around Sing$ 500 which is about 160 quid. The more current 4 and 8 GB versions are also cheaper in the "Tropical Victorian London" by some 20% compared to the real London by the Thames.

All said and done, is this Zen effort the right direction for Creative? A company that made its fortune (and, in certain ways, still does) on the Sound Blaster? After all, Creative could have been almost killed by this media player business if partly not for Apple's recent US$100M "settlement".

This is a very competitive business, with the centres of design and engineering having basically now moved to cities like Dongguan and Suzhou in mainland China, where thousands of hungry, creative engineers dream of new, better and cheaper media players in dozens of outfits - small and big alike. A media player is easier to compete against then, say, a mobile phone or even a high-end digital camera, both having extra mechanical and precision componentry. And, it's really hard to have something truly unique yet proprietary, with easy to defend IP.

Of course, Creative could do something like what came to my mind when playing with the little new Zen today: make the kit modular with an extra matching swappable HSDPA cellphone & camera module that uses the Zen's CPU and large memory - you could take it off when on a flight for instance. Or an HDMI video / projection output module to beam those PPT presentations direct to the large screens or projectors without lugging around a heavy notebook. Of course, the latter would need some kind of OpenOffice and pointing device capability too.

A combined audio/video HDMI output could be also useful for the audio buffs wanting to connect to those new huge hotel LCD TV sets in better outfits, where they can blast the music and video loudly and clearly from the Zen without the irritating earphones and mini screen. Add the H.264 HD playback capability, and you could play compressed HD movies out of SD cards from your Zen, on those big displays.

In fact, the smallish yet biggie-screen black new Zen with its matching-style cellphone module on top could almost remind one of the iPhone - hopefully without the latter's quirks and locks.

Again, all these can (and most probably will) be done by any Greater China gadget vendor, and probably at more aggressive price. But, you'd say, Apple has the same problem then - yes it does, but Apple's got a way stronger brand, not to mention the legions of blindly faitful whose zeal could match quite a few religious extremist organisations. Luckily, there are no such Microsoft zealots, whether for the Zune or that bloated virus called Windows - no one with even a bit of sanity would want to be associated with worshiping something coming out of that house.

So, even when Apple uses those China contractors to make iPods and other iDiot product lines, they need not worry too much about local vendors trying to copy or rip anything - the only thing of any value in those "i" goodies is, well, the Apple brand. Creative doesn't have such luxury in the media player segment.

The high-end sound card business basically only has Creative and Asus in the game in a big way - and Sound Blaster is THE brand here. Yes, there are cards - not just the Asus Xonar, but also some third-party entries based on X-Fi chip, like the Auzen X-Fi Prelude - that offer greater audiophile quality potential, but Creative sets the standard and little seems to change there. Unless, of course, Creative loses the focus.

In my mind Creative has a way better chance of long-term survival by encouraging the adoption of X-Fi and its successors as a kind of real mainboard high end audio standard: a simple PCI-E x1 solution based on the upcoming EMU20K2 audio processor and a single X-RAM chip could provide great multichannel audio at near-zero CPU utilisation for measurably higher gaming FPS, yet still offering mainboard vendors plenty of extra differentiation by the way of noise-reducing riser cards, shields and so on.

A more attractive 'promo' pricing to all mobo vendors willing to take it at least on high end model, coupled with a bit of design assistance, could open the floodgates, especially for the second round of X38 - or Nvidia - based entries at the end of this year.

At the same time, Creative itself could offer a wider variety of sound cards, including high-end offerings with better amp components, noise shielding and unique software bundles. Adding the Dolby and DTS encoding for the home videophile crowd and a bit more of audio creation software from their E-Mu side would nicely round up the standard-worthy offering.

Is this worth more than an endless media player market fight at least for Creative? In my mind, yes - in PC audio, they control the technology, a big chunk of IP and are, well, the standard setter. As far as media players go, they are just one of the product developers - a big notch down on the margin fatness scale where those setting standards (Micro$oft, Intel and co) wipe off the cream.

With the current financial headaches it may not be worth it for Creative to spread themselves too thin. If the new Zen proves to be a success, not just in sales volume but also net profits, I'd be saying "yes, keep it going" - the media player risk would have paid off somewhat.

But, if that doesn't happen, let's better get the focus fully back on the flagship product. Because, if not, the larger, more aggressive and profitable Asus will advance with the Xonars further anyway.

Once the Taiwan giant's multimedia team adds full DSP offload from the PC CPU to the Xonar follow-ons, reduce prices, and increase the software support base, it might be too late for my Singapore compatriots at Creative to rapidly re-focus. µ