ZiiLabs Trinity: A new start for Creative? [Android, OLED, 5 megapixel, 1080p video]

ZiiLabs, a company owned and operated by Creative, just announced Trinity. It isn’t a device that will be available to people like you and me, but instead something more akin to a kit car. Companies looking to get into the smartphone space get in touch with ZiiLabs, and then they’ll get delivery of all the parts and instructions needed to get their project off the ground. The Trinity is a smartphone that has quadband GSM/EDGE, triband WCDMA running at 7.2 Mbps, WiFi, GPS, 3.1 inch OLED screen with 800 x 480 pixels of resolution, mini HDMI port that can output 1080p video, 5 megapixel camera, and a 1130 mAh battery. It will be configurable with with either the ZiiLabs ZMS-05 processor, which is setup in a dual core ARM926 EJ-S configuration (meaning it isn’t going to be very fast), or the ZMS-08, which is an ARM Cortex A8 running at 1GHz. You can think of the ZMS-08 as an iPhone 3GS running 400 MHz faster and with far better graphics capabilities.

Companies who order the Trinity will also receive the complete design schematics, mechanical drawings, even the Gerber files, allowing an unprecedented amount of customization. What we’re talking about is a completely configurable phone, from the chips on the motherboard, to the design of the body. Future models will also be available that support either WiMAX or LTE. The question you may be asking yourself is why Creative, a company known for MP3 players doing this?

The mobile music market, and PC peripheral market is only so large. No one really buys dedicated music players anymore. The mobile phone space on the other hand is exploding, while at the same time consolidation is occurring in the chipset space. It used to be that you would pick and choose which Bluetooth chip you wanted, which WiFi chip, which application processor, all from multiple firms, and then you would slap those components on a high density motherboard and have yourself a mobile phone. All of this custom work was tedious, and costly. In the past year or two things have changed. Large chipset makers start merging with each other and the few that stand now offer entire platforms. You go to one company, like Qualcomm for instance, and you get an application processor, WiFi, GPS, and 3G all built into one neat package.

Creative, I should say ZiiLabs, is taking the next step. They’ve realized that most of the innovation occurring from here on out in the mobile space will be in software, not in hardware. Offering a commodity hardware platform that many lazy Chinese and Taiwanese firms will simply purchase and resell with little to no tweaks, and many boutique mobile phone makers with a vision of a device they have in mind, may yield substantial sales. It’s a risky business to get into, but if it takes off then you’re going to be seeing a flood of powerful devices hitting the market in 2010 and 2011, all running on ZiiLabs hardware.