Here’s an interesting one. Siliconera has dug up what it claims to be a Japanese trademark for the term ” Zii ,” and contrary to what you may expect, the application wasn’t filed by Creative . We double checked the database, and sure enough, the paperwork went through on October 30th — which almost certainly means that this was more than just some day-late attempt to fend off the next-generation of KIRF Wii consoles . There’s obviously no way to tell what the Big N has in mind here, nor if this will cause any kind of friction between it and Creative, but we’ll certainly be keeping an ear to the ground for more. Who knows — maybe the Zii is that HD Wii we’ve all been clamoring for since November of 2006

The portents have hung in the air for a while, but it’s clear now that the traditional dumb PMP is dead, like a dull and rusted Swiss army knife. In their stead we’ll have…smart PMPs. Not to put too fine a point on it, but yeah, we’re talking about the iPod touch model: It’s about platforms . That run apps.

Creative hasn’t really been doing much at all for the last year. Except this, apparently: here’s an FCC filing for a Zii touchscreen PMP, which shares a name their unusual system on a chip announced in January. From the patent, we can see that the Zii is a wi-fi-equipped touchscreen media player, fitted with an “HD” camera, Bluetooth, and, well, that’s about all we know. The presence of a developer version, called the Zii Egg, seems to promise some kind of app support, though it’d be a mistake to immediately jump to the conclusion that the Zii will therefore have an app store; it could just be a dev platform for third parties who could be developing stock apps for the device. Oooooooor, as Engadget plausibly suggests , this could be a part of the first wave of Android PMPs, which would, like any Android phone, have root-access developer units