creative ziio 10', the accidental comex buy

I didn't really imagine myself going to Comex 2011. Until I received a call from my parents during office hour on Friday, asking me to go Comex with them that evening.

Well I did think of getting an iPad for them, since it is not uncommon to see old aunties playing with iPhone on the train, and I guess a Windows-based PC could be harder to learn for the oldbies at home. But I didn't do much research prior to heading down Comex. So over there we saw a couple of Chinese brands Android tablets on 7' screen and yada yada, and the ZiiO 10' at the Creative booth. We decided to go for the bigger screen, and the Singaporean brand.

At first glance the ZiiO 10 has a better look than the other low-end tablets. Just to point out, it doesn't have the standard usb port (has a mini USB), neither does it accept USB charging. But that isn't much an issue since the tablet is for my parents, can't expect them to switch on my computer to charge the tablet. Has a resistive touch screen so it doesn't support multi-touch. The volume and power buttons on the right side are also kind of hidden when you use the pouch for the ZiiO. The biggest drawback? It can't access the Android Market!!

I have no idea why it doesn't have Android Market, but in place it has a quite limited Ziio Shop. My heart sank. Well this was the first time I own (ok, my parents shall own it) an Android platform, so it kind of felt like on unfamiliar land. Perhaps there were problems faced across all Android platforms which I thought only my darn set has. I thought ok, that means I have no access to the ocean of Android apps out there. Isn't the spirit of open source mean open access to stuff? So I read up online, and found that a work around is to go to third party sites and download the .apk files direct. That solved quite a bit of the problem.

Hopefully my parents will like the set. For the time being, they are hugging it all day long reading news and listening to oversea radio stations.