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Palm OS Based Gaming Device Nears Release
Sokie writes "During the past few weeks Tapwave, a startup founded by a couple former Palm employees, has been slowly unveiling the features of their upcoming Helix (Flash heavy link) handheld gaming device. So far, the specs include a 480x320 16-bit color display, dual Secure Digital (SD) slots, Bluetooth connectivity for wireless multiplayer (Wi-Fi available through SDIO), multiple analog controls including triggers, ATI Imageon graphics, and dual rechargable lithium ion batteries (no word yet on battery life). In addition to some cool sounding hardware, several prominent game companies are already signed on to develop games for the Helix, including Activision and Midway. It will also run traditional Palm apps like Calendar and Address Book. Tapwave will continue to unveil a new feature each week for the next few weeks, and the product is supposed to launch in September or October and retail for about $299. PC World has some additional info."
Everyone knows you need developer back up to get anywhere in the 'gaming handheld' business.
Oh well, hopefully the controls are good enough that it could encourage some good homebrew/port games
fp!
Many Thanks,
Luke
But who are they targeting with this product? Who wants an expensive "gaming" device?
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Captain: Take off every sig !!
the Sony PSP?
This is my
First there was the gameboy advance with its PIM cartridge. Now there is a palm device that plays games. Why oh why cant they all just get along?
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Key ID: 0x54D1D809
I have my doubts this new machine will be successful.
The reason is simple: you need high-quality first- and third-party games in order to make it popular--and I haven't heard of such announcements from the makers of Helix.
Nintendo's Game Boy series have done well not only because of the fairly wide range of games developed in-house, but also games developed by third parties. Sony's upcoming PSP machine will likely get quite widely support from third parties, too, given Sony's marketing muscle.
I just don't see this as a "good buy" right now; why put money down on one of these when the PSP is on the way (albeit next year) or when the GBA is a stellar system? Yes, your calendars, your notepad, and all your other programs can go with you, but if games are in mind, this isn't the best out there.
I think handheld computing could take off (again), so the question becomes: wait for a system with the power of my former desktop or buy now and get a system that might be as useless as today's PDA (well, it wouldn't be useless, but it's just such a damn hassle right now). I'd personally wait; I'll just keep using my Palm IIIxe on occasion.
The Political Programmer
Just play on it and act like I'm taking notes. Nod occasionally when I win or lose a game to let the speaker know I'm hearing.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
its basically a Palm without the 'productivity' software?
The website says that it will be released in Late 2003, meanwhile, the site itself is not complete (many links say In Two Weeks, etc) AND there are no pictures of the device at all. The good news is, I hear it's shipping with Duke Nukem Forever.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
hear that? It's the handheld market becoming saturated! It won't bear much more of this...
$300 for a palm with that screen is a bargain.
If we assume that the primary gamers are young, then what's the point of this? I somehow can't imagine an eight year kid with a long list of contacts and the need to have a datebook. Sure, a good portion of gamers are also older with more responsibilities, but how often do thirty-somethings pull out GameBoys? It has got to be nearly as embarassing. I'm not replacing my coffee break with playing on my Palm. My boss would think I was going crazy.
PalmOS gaming is only slightly better than this.
This is a 16-bit system? Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the GBA in my hot little hands (Advance Wars 2 is the shiznit, btw) a 32-bit system? So why am I impressed again? Oh, I know, it's their content-free Flash website that took to long to download even with my trusty T3 line pumping into work. Spare me.
At 16 colours? 16-bit would be good, but 16 is worse than modern cellphones.
What's that? Something about a GBA for 1/3 the price?? LALALALALALALALALALALA!!!!! I can't hear you! lalalalalalalala...........
Frankly, I'm partial to this palm based idea. A true gaming-form factor PDA would be really cool. I'm in the group that wants to play games, but also use it for something serious [palms at work, etc] as well.
However, $299 US is way too much for a portable device. The GameBoy has remained the king of the handheld market because of price. Both the Lynx and the GameGear (the only comparable devices, the NeoGeo Pocket floundered due to a lack of software) failed to gain market share because of their expensive price (alright, lack of software had a little bit to do with the demise of those systems as well). Still, my point remains. If Sony and this company want to steal Nintendo's handheld thunder, they need to keep their prices low.
Have they ever produced a single game that didn't suck? All I can remember is bad 80's arcade games, and Mortal Kombat.
Activision is better, producing Wolfenstein/Enemy Territory and the like, but we're going to need some serious muscle here to fight with the likes of Sony and Nintendo.
IMHO, this is going to be another WonderSwan/Atari Lynx/NeoGeo Pocket Color. Some good ideas, but without developer support you're not going to get any market penetration. Period.
Now I can play Giraffe with a controller!!
A powerfull palmOS based calculator that including pim would be great! Especially since HP is leaving this market.
Games might be a waste for the price being offered. However imagine graphing as well as running mathmatica lite on a 60-80mhz processor! Sweet. It would beat the hell out of the TI's and the no longer updated HP's on the market.
Or better yet download terminal application to log into your unix box. I have seen ones for HP that can long into debian.
I still use my old TI-85 from highschool a decade ago. I think its usefullness will go away as soon as I start Calculus1 soon.
I would love use my palm instead but it has no keyboard and using the screen is obtrusive.
http://saveie6.com/
or better yet... when will linux hackers put linux on it?
I currently own a Palm tungsten T. I swear - the next mobile device I get will be an all-in-one phone. I *hate* having to carry around a PDA *and* a phone, when they should be integrated in one! Handspring Trios and XDA O2 devices rule!
Tapwave is bordering on winning the "Most Useless Website Award For A Company Trying To Break-In To An Oligopolistic Market."
Oooo, who will take home the "Crappie?"
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
Wow, talk about a marketing campaign on a budget. The Flash site was laughable and that Real Video with the dorky guy in the red shirt trying to be hip was totally ludicrous. Not a good way to get a product taken seriously, and neither is the $300 price tag.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
and it's called a palm pilot! I used my Sony Clie to kill tons of valuable class time playing nearly all of the popcap.com games. My gf has a high res color Clie (T615s or something, $90 at Best Buy refurb) and the games look awesome on it. My point? For under $100 you can already have a sweet Palm OS based gaming device that does all that productivity stuff too...
I am just curious, with all the cool little hand held devices, which one is most friendly to the gamer who likes to program as well?
I think it would be a good idea for the companies to make something like the playstation's yaroze back in tha day. Imagine making your own game on the PSP or this new handheld system, or even the gameboy advance! Ah.. but to dream.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
It is 16-bit, ass.
PalmOS will undergo massive changes over the next couple of years, at least if Palm is going to stay in business, so developing for this thing is not going to be fun. The rest of the gaming stuff is proprietary and expensive. And on top of that, the device is itself quite expensive.
In a few months, the T3 will be out with a 320x480 screen and Sony's Clies will have come down to that price. Those cover PDA users who want gaming pretty well. And for gamers who want PDA functionality, the main players are adding more features as it is cost effective.
And Microsoft is pushing PPC quite aggressively, and while the UI on PPC sucks, that doesn't matter for gaming, and the PPC kernel is probably better suited to gaming than PalmOS.
Finally, cell phones are pushing hard into the gaming area, and they seem to be doing quite well. They don't give you stunning graphics, but they have entertaining games, often written in cross-platform J2ME: much easier to program and much bigger target market for vendors.
Traditionally, a company like this might hope to get acquired, but who's going to buy these guys? Maybe Palm will buy back its ex-employees as they did with Handspring, but that's about the best that can happen.
Overall, I think this device has no chance in hell.
I first read about this a couple days ago at work in Infoworld or Infomation Week, or one of those free magazines. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the article there said it would also play MP3s which would make sense. Now it's not going to compare with an iPod for storage anytime soon, but with a couple dozen songs on an SD card it could be fun.
I already have a Clie but since I've been thinking about getting a GBA SP and a MP3 player, this thing really caught my eye. Anyway, glad the story got posted, I'm 2 for 9 now!
------
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YAFIRL (Yet another Free iPods referral link)
If we assume that the primary gamers are young, then what's the point of this? I somehow can't imagine an eight year kid with a long list of contacts and the need to have a datebook.
The statements above completely undercut your argument. The assumption that gamers are children is wrong.
Most gamers are adults. According to the recently renamed Entertainment Software Association (formerly the IDSA -- Interactive Digital Software Assoc.) the average gamer is 29 years old. About 2/3 of gamers are over the age of 18.
With that in mind, the Tapwave Helix gaming PDA is aimed at the adults, not the children. Adults earn money and have disposable income. The average core gamer is in his mid-20s -- who do you think it is who buys the Voodoo, Falcon and Alienware rigs? Those are the same people who will buy the Helix provided the software titles are present.
It's the graphics capabilities, the sound capabilities, etc, that determine how cool a system is.
Back in the 1980s, Sega developed the marketting technique of 16-bit. Their Sega Genesis was better than the NES not because it was 16-bit, but because it had better capabilities. IE: it had a dedicated Z80 (8-bit CPU!) for sound, and its PPU could do more interesting things with more sprites and more colours than the NES' PPU.
The SNES is the same thing: a custom Sony CPU with wavetable support for sound, and a really awesome PPU which had things like mode 7 FX. The CPU in it was 1/3rd the speed of the Genesis cpu because the CPU of your gaming system does not determine how cool the system is overall.
The Palm gaming platform is no different. Who cares if one part is 16-bit? It's all about how the entire system works as a whole.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
All I know is you can pick up a GameBoy for under $70 ( see http://www.pricescan.com/videogames/scripts/Q02010 000.asp ) and get a machine that somebody actually writes games for, which for me is a nice bonus.
This is what I've been looking for in a PDA.
wifi + memory
camera + memory
Let me express my cynicism this way:
This appears to be one of two things. Either it is an overpriced gameboy with low-end PDA specs, or an Ipaq for people who think themselves too stupid to figure out how to download native games, or currently available NES, SNES, Gensis and MAME emulators onto their own Ipaq. Its only advantage over the current batch of XScale PDAs, it seems, will be developer support, unless you believe that Compaq's and Palm's engineering and battery life advancements at the time of this device's release will be found inferior to this one's, which seems unlikely. Maybe they'll forgo a modern screen to save power, but then why not just get a gameboy? Will developer support for a gaming platform manufacturer not a major name in the industry, who is furthermore in COMPETITION with major names in the industry, be, itself, competitive? I find it hard to answer that with a yes.
And let's be clear on this: this device is not out NOW. It is not, at least as far as specs go, competing with presently available devices like the 200MHz Ipaq 1910, say, selling for $250 or 400MHz Ipaq 2215 selling for $370. It is not, at least as far as available titles go, in any place to come close to competing with existing platforms like the Gameboy. This device, the existence of which at all is purely speculative, is priced at $299 for a release at best several months to come.
If you want a handheld computer and want to play games on it, buy an Ipaq 1910, also with SDIO, currently available for under $250 depending on where you shop and play Age of Empires, Everquest, PocketQuake, PocketDoom, SNES, NES, Genesis, SMS, MAME and the upcoming titles now.
If you want a handheld gaming system with titles available NOW, go with the Gameboy.
If you want to wait several months to pay a PDA price for your next Gameboy without any certainty as to whether titles will in FACT be available at all, then this is the system for you. Hmm.
If the point of issuing press releases is to get stories, this is a pretty bad way to handle it. Do they expect mainstream news sources to publish a story like "Tapwave gadget will have one more button than previously thought" or "Smart Media card support unveiled for that thing we covered last week"? No-one would care. They'd be better off doing a big unveiling and getting lots of review samples out there.
Maybe if they're going for a niche market, PalmOS websites and the like will play along, but I bet even they get bored with weekly hype.
I lack good controls (and Linux) on my Pocket Loox, so trying to play anything with some action i.e snes games is too tricky.. I'm stuck with pocketscumm :) :)
some things that would make this baby interesting:
syncing with linux (it seems to be running palm os, so syncing doesn't seem impossible)
a port of mplayer or something in the likings
a nes/snes emulator
Activision releases Re-Volt, or maybe Rc revenge for the device
- I choked on the red pill and now I'm stuck in limbo
Analog controller, integrated triggers and a full complement of action buttons
This is what makes it better for gaming that the current range of PDA's. Having an Analog controller is a good thing IMHO it's what's missing from every handheld gaming device that I've encountered. The only reservation that I have is the construction quality. If you can snap the stick off, or even if it only feels like you can then it will be totally pointless. Otherwise, I think that the device has a really good chance. Certainly looks more promising than the N-Gage...
...because it takes 6 weeks for the Flash to load
All things in moderation; including moderation
This could be a good move here, Palm OS is one of the easiest development platforms in widespread use. It has also prooven its self in the handy market through the treo line from handspring. lets just hope it doesn't turn out like some of the Bad Implimentations of a handy/gaming system.
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
Really. Won't be very long 'till they come with some sort of VR equipment - aren't there some slick VR glasses that have (soft) lasers beaming directly onto your retina? If you can have a handheld unit that does the same as your xbox or ps2, who stick with the bulkier one? Remember, there's a wireless revolution going on..
;)
So - I think this Helix thing will be the best thing since sliced bread
Stop the brainwash
We've seen this kind of marketing strategy before, but I don't think I can recall one where it has been deliberate. That is. . , "What will the new Computer/Car/Quake do!? The world wants to know!" -And, frankly, so does the company's PR department, because they've been ready to go since March, but nobody will tell them what the hell the product is suppoed to do, so they release what little they can when they can. As such, the whole exercise actually helps to ramp up the anticipation among the gear/tech/gamer heads.
Wonder if it'll work when they tell you up front that this is what they're doing. --Will people be offended by the manipulation or will they see it in the spirit of fun?
Other than that. .
A new game device. Oh joy. --Ooh, and one which has all the destructive qualities of microwave technology, but this time, in the hands of children with still developing brains. --Perhaps softening their brains with EM while they soften their brains with video crack will improve our odds of a smooth take-over of Humanity. (I think there may be a measure which is directly proportional to the amount of drool swinging from lax lips.)
-FL
I can't believe I'm not seeing shouts of "wait till I port GNU/Linux to it!"
I'm also surprised more people are not crazy about this idea, especially considering the competition coming out soon like the n-gage from Nokia. Why am I surprised? Because the PalmOS is a haven for open-source developers where many of them can't abide to develop for a Pocket PC, and the n-gage is obviously a more closed type of system.
So, wake up! It's a Palm--and it's got a controller built-in. I've been waiting for this (and had a fully fleshed-out idea for it) for a few years! And I bet the Liberty folks will be salivating over this announcement.
1.) The Videos were stupid. One had some guy babble on about how the GBA sucks, sporting a stupid orange shirt, and stupid facial hair. The other showed more crap, less screenshots.
2.) The site was soooo dumb. Saving features so people have to come back for them when they are released? How many times did you click on the other features untill you realized they were not active? Where are the screenshots? Game info?
3.) $299
Yes, yes, sounds like a great little piece of hardware. The question is -- will they give away the SDK?
The exorbitant licensing fees for the 'privilege' to help hardware manufacturers to sell their products is the reason I, for one, don't write games for the Gameboy and its ilk. (Which is particularly sad, since I used to program in assembly language on a very similar platform years ago and still have the skills.)
Open the SDK and they will come.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
This thing is actually cheap! How can I say that when a GBA is only $70? Compare it to all the other Palm PDAs with a 320x480 screen. It's the cheapest one with PalmOS5 and ARM based.
Since this can also be used for everything else a Palm is used for, I've heard many people say that they'd get it for PIM/productivity stuff, and screw the games.
Ooh, and one which has all the destructive qualities of microwave technology, but this time, in the hands of children with still developing brains.
Oh, come now. Bluetooth is not powerful enough to have any detrimntal affects on the children. Look at meee, my Plam and cellfoan have Blootueth, and there'sss nottthiiingg wrng wittth miiy brane yeeet....
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I just traded in my $300 m515 Palm for a $200 PocketPC (Toshiba 740) because it offered 320x240 (vs 160x160), wifi, more memory, dual expansion slots (SD & CF) and a real 3D graphics chip along with the availability of impressive games like Age of Empires while my Palm barely played a Civilization clone called Kindgoms.
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't the PPC make a better choice for a gaming system platform? X-Box seems to be doing pretty well with it's Microsoft roots, so I'd think a portable X-Box would fair well in the market.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
My God that Borah shit is hilarious. Thank you for brightening my morning.