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Tapwave Closes its Doors
ewhac writes "Tapwave, makers of the universally acclaimed Zodiac mobile gaming device/media player/PalmOS PDA formally announced on their Web site that, 'the Zodiac business was discontinued and service and support are no longer available as of July 25th 2005.' The Zodiac was a PalmOS 5.2 device with gaming and media features, including ATI graphics and Yamaha sound acceleration, proportional joystick, two SD slots, Bluetooth, 200MHz ARM CPU (Freescale i.MX1), and up to 128M of RAM. At the most recent Palm developer conference, Tapwave employees were showing Zodiacs running their own port of Linux 2.6.10, with ports of SDL, Python, PyGame, mpg123, and primitive power management. It is unknown what will become of this work."
...but does anyone else see a resemblence in the physical appearance to the PSP?
It just struck me as odd.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The problem with this device, as I remember looking at it at the local shop, was that it was an answer to a problem no one had.
If I want a game system that's pocket portable, I will play with my PSP (better library of games, better gaming platform).
If I want a PDA, I will use my HP hx4705 (VGA screen, better support by 3rd party programmers, better power management).
The other features just sucked. It was slow, and it was 'campy' in design. I know - it's hard to come up with something professional and fun to use in a gaming environment. Just because it can/would have been able to run Linux doesn't make it the pancea of the mobile product world. Sorry, but it's true.
If the Zodiac is no more, then what do I say, if someone asks me what my sign is?
*sits here, watching the following thread for the puns and fun answers*
Luke
-----
Have a teaching-about-computer-basics website? Maybe you might want to swap links with ChristianNerds.com?
Shame, really. Product so far ahead of its time. But that's why it failed in the marketplace.
Makes you wonder what kind of market it is that rewards the incrementalists, while punishing innovators.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is very sad.
If you're looking for a replacement, the closest you're probably going to find is the GPX2, which is being made by the makers of the GP32. It runs linux and has an incomplete but pretty decent sized fraction of the Zodiac's feature list. They claim they want to sell it for $100, but it seems almost ridiculously improbable they could pull that off..
The gadget seems to have been a multi-purpose device that played games in addition to being a standard PDA.
I wonder, in this day and age, whether such combination devices are really that useful/usable. There is a very strong drive to integrate all sorts of technologies together into super-portable-do-it-all devices (like "smart" phones). However, is there really a market for an All-in-one device like the Zodiac?
What I see is a PDA with a gaming API grafted on, not a solid gaming device. The device itself looks like a gaming device (sans nice styling), but that pretty much precludes it from being a portable/usable PDA due to the larger size.
I think we can chalk this one up as another failure in the handheld gaming device category, joining GB3D, Lynx, TG-portable, and the latest NintendoDS.
But inquiring minds want to know, will the existing stock be made available at reduce prices?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Not sure if posters can claim this product never made sense... when they are such hot sellers on eBay.
Well, actually... it will probably become even cooler now that they discontinued.
Anyone know where I can buy 30 of these?
I'm more inclined to get a Sharp Zaurus (with 4GB hard drive) than spend money on seperate PDA, gaming handheld, and iPod mini. Ok sure, maybe you can't play many taxing games on a Zaurus, but at least it can do emulators pretty well.
Plus I need something to view PDAs on the go as well.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I can see other possibilities for hacking these such as low-end server blades, really small clients, etc. PC-in-a keyboard stuff. Add micro-drives. Anyone else with ideas?
C|N>K
My theory is that it tried to go toe to toe with Nintendo and the GBA. Sure it had the whole touch screen thing before the DS but you just don't mess with the Gameboy.
Maybe they should have consulted with the makers of the NeoGeo Pocket, Wonderswan, GP32, Atari Lynx, Game Gear, Nomad and various others on how to try to tackle the Gameboy.
"I hope they do the right thing and open-source the code..."
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Nice troll, but hey get your Facts Straight
5 million DSes out there... DS is by no means a failure. In comprison, the PSP has failed so misserably that they took it off the market in the UK. better hand-held console? They've lost to nintendo before, and sony is no exception.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Maybe they should have spent a little money on marketing instead of relying on osmosis to attract customers.
Like all other game consoles that failed, they didn't have enough brand-name games. They had quite a few overpriced shareware games, and some ports of older PC games like Doom 2 and spyhunter, and a few interesting original games. The PDA itself was a really good design. I liked the one I saw in CompUSA and I was seriously considering getting one just as a PDA. It had a large ammount of RAM, dual SD slots (one SDIO), bluetooth, a display that matched the high end PalmOne PDAs like the T3. It is a shame the company went under. Maybe they wouldn't have if I actually bought them instead of obsessivly checking their website.
I guess the success of the Zodiac just wasn't in the stars...
PSP is not even available in Europe yet.
Its official debut is 1st, September.
The units sold in the UK were illegal grey market devices coming from Japan and the US at premium prices.
Sony got the retailers to stop selling those devices until the official launch date.
PSP is a huge success and the European debut is yet to come, which will boost the sales massively.
The Nintendo DS, the handheld machine that failed so hard that it's a couple thousand units shy of being the best-selling video game system of any kind in Japan for all of 2005, and will probably be the best selling in another week or two; and which failed so hard in America it is currently the #2 handheld system, with not nearly as many units sold as the Nintendo Game Boy Advance but more sold than the Sony PSP.
Let's remember: "success" isn't based on how many units you sell, or how much money you make. It's based on whether people on internet message boards like you.
(Another thought for the road: Who is the troll? The slashdotter who makes questionable claims? Or the slashdotter who corrects them with reams of poorly spelled fanboyish insults?)
You aren't very bright are you? Sony has stopped the sales of IMPORTED PSP's in stores. The PSP has not been released in Europe yet and so people have to import them from other countries using Lik-Sang and such...
It's universally acclaimed, and by "universally acclaimed" I mean that neither I nor anyone I know had even heard of it before this article. Maybe everyone who used one liked it, but you have to be ubiquitous before you can be universally acclaimed. Of course, nobody who knows what ubiquitous actually means other than "cool gadget that I saw in Best Buy on two occasions" has ever had a story approved for the front page of Slashdot.
They seemed only half serious about supporting it as a game console (Doom2?! WTF!) and it lacked the features most would want in a PDA.
Much like the Ngage it was too many things and wasn't good at any of them.
I'm not quite sure what is meant when other posters say that it was ahead of its time.
As far as I can see it was a palm with dual SD slots.
Can someone enlighten me?
It seems my personal observations do not jibe with the actual numbers in regards to the NintendoDS and PSP. I see PSPs all around (not in the creepy 6th Sense way, just they seem to be pretty popular), but I hardly ever see the DS. I looked up the latest sales numbers for this past week and it looks like the DS is outpacing the PSP by about 60% in Japan.
http://www.m-create.com/eng/e_ranking.html
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
The only way a PDA/gaming device is going to work is if it still looks professional, like the current non-gaming PDAs. Professionals really don't want their business hardware looking like a toy.
The only problem I see with current PDAs is they keep shrinking their directional pad and buttons. Put a decent graphics chip in it, make the buttons gaming friendly, give it decent battery life, and make it look professional. Then I'd buy it.
Discount advanced mobile technology! Nirvana, here I come!
This was completely predictable: a PalmOS machine with a proprietary gaming library was a really stupid idea. It made them dependent on PalmOS, tied them to an outdated software architecture, and meant that they still had to do lots of custom software development.
I think even if they had started off with Linux on those devices, they would have failed: wrong market, wrong timing. But they would have had a slightly better chance than with what they actually did.
Call me odd, but I want my phone to actually be a good phone. I miss my old StarTac. Awesome reception, incredible call clarity, and a battery that would last a day and a half. Unlike my current phone with a dead battery by lunch... But I can take really crappy pictures. I would rather have many devices that do there jobs well, than one device bad at all of them.
"You can always spot the pioneers by the arrows in their backs."
--William Calvin
I gave the Tapwave Zodiac 2 a very top-shelf rating : "Natalie Portman"
Storm Shadow "The Hook Up" http://www.pe
The Palm Powered Multimedia Handheld
-=Linsys=-
http://www.intrusionsec.com
... you read about the closing/failure/cancellation/discontinuing of something "universally acclaimed" that you've never heard of?
Quote a quote, "Zodiac blew us away with its too-good-to-be-true multimedia functionality"
As the old saying goes...
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
I had(have) one. Wonderful little device in almost every way. Solid design, good screen (a bit washed out colors, but still), plenty speed for a PalmOS.
The only problem was the DRM.
See, software that took advantage of the special hardware accelerator/screen API/system functions in the Zodiac had to have been cleared and approved by Tapwave, they'd turn on the "Not Evil" bit and you could run it. Otherwise, it'd reset your device.
They blocked access to parts of the OS, so no third party language addons would work (no russian, no japanese in my case).
Since all programs had to pass by them, they got to pick what they would allow people to run. I remember a big stink when they wouldn't authorize a GBA emulator, because Nintendo had threatened the company that wrote it (not Tapwave) originaly. That certanly hurt them, and I have seen developers stay away from the Zodiac for worry about whether their program would be allowed to run on it. (This is once again, only for programs that changed the OS, or used the zodiac special features, hardware accelerated graphics, and so on)
Furthermore all software that was authorized to run, could only run on your one zodiac. It'd reset otherwise. I had a hell of a time with that when having to replace my Zodiac for another one.
In the end it had great hardware, so-so software, and a draconian enough DRM to annoy most users, and a fair amount of developers. Really sad to see it go, but I have been expecting this.
they are going out of business, are they going to get rid of their DRM (application signing) requirement?
somehow i very much doubt it. and it's a damn shame, now that you can pick one up cheaper than before, it's not really worth it.
this is going to be a very major issue in the years ahead.
DRM will ultimately cripple the hell out of our devices and will clog up landfills when they go out of business.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I just bought one Zodiac about a month ago, (One of the local stores recently had the Zodiac on clearance) fearing that it would soon be pulled from the market. Now don't get me wrong, I love the thing to pieces, but there are a few reasons why it failed:
1 - The price. High-end PDA's aren't cheap, and definitely not as cheap as say, a gameboy or an ipod. $250 was borderline for me, and chances are most other students thought so too. Add an SD card or two on, as well as mostly $20 knockoffs of gameboy games, and you're looking at $300+ for the low-priced model. (two models where available: the zodiac 1 32meg and the zodiac 2 128meg)
2 - Still a PDA, not quite a portable. Tapwave tried too hard to make the Zodiac an all-in-one device. It was basically a PDA, uber-gameboy, ipod, and movie player in one, or rather that was the goal. Tapwave seemed to rely more on a sexy design than anything else, and it cost them. At first glance, the handheld looks like it's far too small, but it continues to have one of the largest screens to grace a PDA. (backlit 480x320x16)
3 - Developers: To start, there are relatively few large companies that produce PDA games (at least for the Palm) right now. Anything beyond simple flash games either have clunky controls or poor quality. Although the zodiac was well designed, I found it to be a bit small and cramped for my hands. (but then again, so are gameboys) Lastly, all Zodiac-specific apps had to be digitally signed by Tapwave in order to run on non-developer hardware. (developers could bypass this via something called DAA, which allowed non-signed apps) The only way around this was to either develop an app that would work on both normal palms and the zodiac, or create a signed core app that stored code in modules. So, few games and apps had full zodiac support.
So in short the pros:
+ sexy design
+ innovative
+ best screen for the palm
And the cons:
- expensive
- lack of developer support
- perhaps a bit ahead of its time
Yet another victim, left unable to sustain itself in the vacuum of the N-Gage's wake, falls before the allmighty Nokian. The powerful N-Gage Arena community bellows a mightly laugh at the plight of the vastly inferior Tapwave. Said Jorma Ollila, "How could any device with a name like that ever hope to succeed? One can be engaged, but not tapwaved!"
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
Pretty Please?
Ob: 30? How many does it take for a beowulf cluster? [notes that so far no one has mentioned mutant lobsters in boston harbor.]
2 days ago Tapwave has gone the way of the Apple Newton and the Sony Clie. I got my Zodiac a few months ago and love it. The best multimedia/gaming PDA ever. The ATI graphics was so awesome for games and videos.[mpeg decoding] Is the GPX2 to take the Zodiac's place?[the next GP32]
-Legodude522 of PalmInfocenter and Tapland.
Because I have low karma, I need pills.
I needed a replacmeent PDA for my Treo (90), another orphan. I looked at what I could get get in a Palm and at the end the Tapwave Zodiac met the mission.
I wanted WiFi capability while stil having a slot for extra storage. The Zod has two SD slots. You can put a WiFi card in one and flash disk in the other. Ironically PalmOne couldn't do that in the top PDAs. The Tungsten3 can have flash OR WiFi, not both.
Better, Tapwave wrote drivers for a combo SD card from SanDisk that has both WiFi and 256MB of RAM on a signle card.
CompUSA put them on sale for $199 for Zodiac q and $299 for the Zodiac 2 with your choice of 4 $29 games. I picked up a Zodiac 1 and 4 games of which I've opened one.
The best part was the clerk at CompUSA covered my Zodiac with a 2 year extended warranty for $29. I'm safe to get $200 credit even with Tapwave gone.
Not only does the Zodiac have stereo sound, it has pulse feedback on the games.
I'm enjoying using mine to listen to podcasts. I got the SanDisk Wifi + 256 card and it works fairly well. It'll serve in a pinch.
Look for even better bargain closeouts on Zodiacs. It might make sense for you too to adopt an orphan.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Zodiac had three problems:
1) Games. They needed a "Killer App" in the worst way. I mean, even the Saturn had "Panzer Dragoon" and Dreamcast had "Soul Caliber." Instead, they seemed to pursue the most mediocre and middle-of-the-road games they could, the "premier" game being a warmed over version of Doom.
2) Marketing. There was no buzz. They scored the incredible coup of getting their device prominently displayed in every CompUSA, but failed to advertise it, or even poisition it where it would be visible to it's target audience. (20-something professionals.) Take out a full page ad or two in Maxxim, fer chrissakes.
3) Not gearing themselves to succeed small, and grow big. They overreached themselves without a killer game and proper publicity. There are high-tech products that survive and thrive despite flying under the radar (see Sony's Qualia division, or McIntosh Audio, or Saleen supercars for good examples.) But, you need to batten down the financial hatches, and realize you're going to live on the edge of solvency for the first five ro ten years. (Alienware is a great example of such a company who actually made it.)
So, even tho the Tapwave was one of the sexiest pieces of kit on the market (that metal shell felt like a William Gibson wet-dream), it couldn't deliver the killer app, it wasn't advertised to it's target audience effectively, and Tapwave tried to grow too quickly, and drowned in venture capital it had no hope of repaying.
Ah, well, if I find one on clearance, I'll buy it regardless, because hey, it is a cool little gizmo.
SoupIsGood Food
I've got a Zodiac2 (Zod2) and its a great little device. PalmOS5 runs on it beautifully - a lot of the apps have been updated to use the ATI functionality and whiz along (eg Core Media player), lots of built in RAM, doesnt suck juice badly (unlike PocketPC devices :-( ), I have SDIO WiFi, its built in bluetooth I use with a navman GPS. This device is, on a daily basis, a composite of many other devices I would have had to buy. okay, apart from a line up of mostly poor commercial games, there is really only one bad thing - the available (or lack of) web browsers. they are all ropey - this thing needs a port of Firefox or Opera.
Companies that develop intellectual property consider it an assets (be it movies, music, software, whatever).
So expecting them to give away software (not that I'm suggesting you expect anything) would be analogous to asking a closing restaurant to give away its plate and deep fryer that they hope to sell to pay debts/recoup losses/etc.
Its a nice idea, but I get the feeling that a lot of people think shelved software is zero value. Atari would tell you different...but even if that doesn't happen they can (and do) certainly hope someone might come along and buy the technology.
Quack, quack.
They should have given a pre-announcement, then at least the /. crowd would have gotten a chance to buy their last stock. With the /. effect they now get more visitors, hence more visibility and better chance to sell something, then they apparently had before.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
the tapwave was pretty cool, but too expensive.
I wonder why no-one mentioned the multiplayer gaming via bluetooth? I've discovered and played w/ several at a time with that capability. I haven't seen anything quite like it.
You could even use that bluetooth thing for multiuser chat and whiteboarding...
I interviewed with them about a year ago. They didn't hire me.
This explains why they failed.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
This is exactly what killed it. Sure there were no major gaming studios looking to port the latest PS2 titles to it, but there were tons of indie developers interested in putting popcap-style games and last-generation style 3D games on this thing. But you couldn't thanks to the wonderful PalmOS and the signed code system.
If this had been an open platform based on PocketPC, there would have been alot more games for it. Sad to see it go, my husband and his best friend both own one and got alot of fun out of them, but the promise of this machine never fully materialized.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
It's amazing how easy it is to predict failure in this current market/development climate. Anything that's too far ahead of the curve or where the investors want an instant big bang payoff just isn't going to succeed, no matter what. Also, tapwave never seemed to acknowledge that others were developing similar solutions (nothing is quite the same, even now -- but granted, for any function of the tapwave there is another device now that does it better, just not yet one that does them all!) And they're still going out of business? Do you know how much effort goes into these failed technologies? Please, stop this cycle in the valley. We can't afford it. This is not the developer's fault (although, they did botch the real-time media services added to the Palm kernel so bad that development was at least 6 months if not a year or more longer than planned. A company I used to work for contracted to provide sounds for the device; I could have been in on this project, but after watching from the sidelines for a meeting or two (or three or four) I realized that the engineers were f-ing up technology that was almost doing everything they needed already. Trust me it is truly disturbing listening to sounds hiccuping on an operating kernel so small. Especially when these interruptions were due to minimal io tending. So, I'm not surprised when they came out with little SPECIFIC 3rd party suport (meaning nothing that took advantage of its unique attributes (screen res, sound streams, digital-proportional joystick io, etc.), weak marketing (everyone should love us for one feature, but we're not acknowledging that basically no one is asking for these functions integrated in one device). Whatever. I'm disappointed. Not because another temporary technology ploatform bit the dust (long live intellivision!), but because I saw it happening from the beginning. This one could have survived with competent partnering, an attempt at marketing (no not everyone in the world reads wired and silicon valley billboards), and lo and behold! - a business plan that acknowledges a time for turn around on investment that might last as long as until a decent SECOND GENERATION product is on the market. The true sadness of this failure was not that the technology sucked or that the failure was imminent, it was purely poor strategy that was evident from the first handshake. F*** these businessmen sucking the soul of innovation out of the valley.
Everyone that says they never heard of the Zodiacs. I've got like 20 or so different magazine articles, all from game mags all the way to some consumer business mags. They all reviewed this thing, and it's predecessor. Where the fuck were you guys at? The closet mayhaps.
Yes, I said it.
I bought one of these for my wife to replace her Palm Tungsten, which is very slick, but has a battery life in the nanosecond range :)
Got it cheap from morganscomputers, (who buy it wholsale from companies going bust) so I knew they were up against the wall. It's a really nice bit of kit, no intention of playing anything other than solitaire on it. But it's far lighter then the PSP, and comes with a mail client and a web browser, and the dual slot means one for memory, and one for a wifi card. So with wifi going cheap the world over, especially as a gimick in burger king, etc. It means that we can surf and send emails on the fly. No need to worry if the PC we're using is bugged, and no need to pay for it either.
To quote Ferris:
"If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. They are so choice." :)
http://www.sysadminday.com/ System Administrator Appreciation Day!
Friday, July 29th, 2005 6th Annual
The Party Is Today!
Send your SysAdminDay celebration pictures - Send a message, comment, or suggestion.
System Administrator Appreciation Day - A special day, once a year, to acknowledge the worthiness and appreciation of the person occupying the role, especially as it is often this person who really keeps the wheels of your company turning.
This appreciation day includes many system administrators:
.
Computer Administrators
Network Administrators
Internet Administrators (webmaster)
Telephone (PBX) Administrators
Voice-Mail Administrators
Database Administrators (DBA)
Email System Administrators
Mainframe Systems Programmers ("sysprogs")
. .
What is a System Administrator
An individual responsible for maintaining a multi-user computer system, including a local-area network (LAN), wide-area network (WAN), Telephone system, or voice-mail system. See Figure 1. Typical duties include:
Adding and configuring new workstations
Setting up user accounts
Installing system-wide software
Performing procedures to prevent the spread of viruses
Allocating mass storage space
Answering questions
The system administrator is most often called the sysadmin, or S.A., or just the systems administrator. Small organizations may have just one system administrator, whereas larger enterprises usually have a whole team of system administrators
It's not just because people are biased against non-brand-name products, but would you spend $500 on a product from a company you're not sure will be around in 6 months for support?
So:
no confidence in small company = slow sales.
slow sales = failing company
failing company = no sales
It's not rocket science, it's reality.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Learn from this one folks: without marketing and sales, no matter how good your product is, you will are doomed. The first time I heard Zodiac was their death announcement. In the time they've been on the market I've purchased three PDAs and certainly would have given one of theirs a try.
-- $G
and I'm trying to track down a Turbo Express.
Be sure to ask the seller about the sound. The have a common problem of losing it; though the audio does fade back in as the unit warms up. Heard it even occurs with brand new units that have been sitting in the box for the past decade.
Still a cool system though. Love my PC Engine GT.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
That should give you an idea of the trouble behind it.
Imagine for a minute you're a hardware developer (maybe you are, but play along) with a great idea for a Convergence Device.
You know that a PDA that can play games with a game-friendly and generally useful input mechanism and a big screen would ultimately redefine the PDA.
You have to build this system, and expand on the Palm platform. Lots of hardware testing, R&D, and software development to get games like THPS to run on a Palm.
*THEN*, you have to keep the price reasonable for all this advanced hardware that took a long time to get ready.
By that time, what was hot has started to become tepid.
Tepid doesn't sell. Especially not at a premium.
Small company trying to do something innovative without the inertia and market-mass that benefits efforts by larger companies.
Its a little early to call the Nintendo DS a failure, especially when it is outselling the PSP in Japan. Why does everyone want Nintendo to fail so badly?
Umm, and exactly what do you mean by "Universally acclaimed?" Please be a dear to show us the list of articles written about this product that nobody outside of Slashdot has heard of.
Kriston
I agree with the idea that the Zodiac's size kept it from being a portable PDA. The size is the number one thing that kept me from getting one of these. I have carried a Palm OS device with me nearly everywhere I go since 1999. I spent some time playing with the Zodiac at a local CompUSA and was experiencing some serious technolust. However, the Zodiac, was just too big to be carried daily in my cargo pants/shorts like other Palm OS devices. BTW- I'm having some of the same feelings about the new PSP.
english is my first language, but my only formal education in it was from U.S. public schools, so you may forgive me for
It's incrementalism that killed Tapwave. Instead of going out and creating a future-proof gaming platform, they took PalmOS and stuck on a third party gaming library. How much more "incremental" can you get? PalmOS 5 was an obsolete platform before they even started. And Tapwave followed a long chain of obsolete thinking about proprietary APIs, starting at Apple, then Palm, and finally Tapwave.
What would an innovative gaming platform have looked like? Something with an open source OS (maybe Linux, maybe something entirely new) and an open source gaming library. Something that would have made it radically easier to develop games for it. Something with a new class of games on it, with social networking applications, with new controllers and hardware.
Tapwave was "punished" because they were incrementalists; failure was pretty much inevitable for them. If they had actually been innovative, it would still have been risky, but at least they might have had a chance.
Well, I was looking *real* hard at one of these a year ago. But, they only had them at CompUSA, and when I went there, they had the unit on some kind of tether, running a canned 'look how cool I am' program. No way to actually interact with the device, no way to play with it in its normal run mode. So, no, I'm not going to drop $400 on something based upon a looping animation it shows me.
Waited a bit, and bought a PSP.
now that there is a MAME port for Palm OS. While it's still very Beta-ish, I run arcade classics on my Treo 650 and love it.
:o)
Too bad that couldn't have played up that aspect... If they could have licensed some of the ROMS for classics, I think that might have helped. Of course, I suppose guys like me who were teen arcade junkies when Space Invaders was new are a limited audience.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
... Just root, coffee and chocolate.
Everytime I've seen the Zodiac I've wondered how they could possibly stay in business. $300 for essentially a NDS/PSP device. It's a bit bulky to be a PDA. It's battery life is terrible if you actually play any games on it. And there are only a few games for it.
If you make a game system, please remember to license it so you will actually have games when it's released. Also helps if one of those games is a "killer app".
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The pro's and con's from pocketnow.com:
l &t=reviews&id=482
PROS
* Fantastic screen
* Dual Secure Digital slots
* Decent sound
* Small size
* As a Palm-based device, it can take advantage of a larger software base
CONS
* Some applications don't run, or run sluggishly
* Button colors can't be seen when your finger is on them
* Analog stick can be flaky at times
* Sound can be crackly and buzzing can be heard
* Flipscreen will not stay closed
* OS Update needed to run a game that has already been released
* Price
http://www.pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detai
I ended up giving mine to my brother (as I already had a PDA), and he uses it only sparingly at this point. Interesting device (with a very nice screen), just a lot of Cons.
... I mean, there may be vehement fans of the Geek Utility Belt(tm) out there, but normals want one device that does it all, so there's only one thing to keep track of and only one thing to learn how to use.
I want an uvvy, or what's as close as possible given current technology.
Here's hoping Apple pulls it off, or SonyEricsson gets its thumb out its ass and releases the Hermione with 3G and voice recognition...
The Phaistos Disc was ahead of its time. It is a clay disc printed on both sides, using pre-made seals. The technology is similar to the Gutenberg Bible, and was probably created in 1700 B.C., about 3000 years earlier. However, it did not create the same explosion of printed content of the Gutenberg press, and it is a mystery what the disk actually says.
There are several reasons. At the time and place that the disk was manufactured, there were probably only a handful of people that could read and write, so there was no market of readers looking for cheaper printed materials. Paper wasn't available as a cheap, lightweight printing medium. Metal wasn't available to make high quality letter molds, and the circular pattern required pre-planning on the part of the scribe, where movable type and block text is much more flexible.
The Phaistos scribe had a really good idea, using preformed molds and a static alphabet for creating written material. However, it required another few thousand years of cultural and technological progress for the idea to actually catch on and take hold. History is full of technology (automobile, steam engine, etc.) that required the right environment for it to catch on and become part of the culture. Read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies for further examples and analysis.
Since they are the only console manufacturer still around that managed to survive the video game crash of 84, they ended up with the same kind of near monopoly that Microsoft has in the PC world, and people resented (and still resent) them for it.
Sony's gone quite a way to cutting into that near-monopoly, and Microsoft's catching up... (Personally, I like the Xbox a lot more that I like the GC) But I highly doubt that Nintendo will ever completely overcome the stigma...
I met with Tapwave at E3 in 2004. I work for a fairly large gaming website and told them all of our stats, which usually impress most new'ish hardware/gaming companies. They just didn't care. As with all of my meetings I followed up with an email to them, and again they didn't care. My goal was to receive a Tapwave and review it as well as its games, no go. I even asked for an evaluation sample, no go. They flatout refused to let go of one of these things, which surprised me since I thought they would want as much exposure as possible.
I would have loved the chance to play with one of these, but was never given the opportunity.
nuff said
True anecdote from 2003, around the time the Zodiac and the n-Gage had both hit the market, and a friend was chatting up an EA employee:
Friend: So, I see you have a few n-Gage games lined up. What about the Zodiac?
EA Employee: Well, we're putting focus on the n-Gage only, because let's face it--Nokia's still going to be here in a few years. Tapwave isn't.
Friend (perplexed): Well... yeah. If no one's making any games for it, it won't.
And then I read this article.
"Each time you smile, it'll only last awhile. Life may be scary, but it's only temporary."
Can I buy one cheap but useable then?
Never heard of them. Anyone know why they failed?
Usually the answer follows the question, not the other way around.
You should've seen the Kyocera 6035. It's old by modern standards, but when it came out it was a great PDA and an AMAZING phone.
:(
The T600 is a great leap forward from the Kyocera in terms of PDA features, but its phone functionality is a huge step back from the Kyo. Too bad the 7135 royally bombed and we probably won't see any more smartphones from Kyocera anymore.
(BTW, I do have a T600 now and love it, I just wish it had some of the 6035's telephony features such as built-in voice recognition which works very well and automatic entry of your voicemail password when dialing voicemail.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
However, the Zodiac, was just too big to be carried daily in my cargo pants/shorts like other Palm OS devices.
I fits comfortably in my jeans pocket (with a bunch of other stuff), cargo pants should make it even easier. It's only slightly bigger than other Palms.
As a few posters mentioned, Tapwave was REALLY restrictive about releasing the SDKs for the Zodiac-specific hardware in their products. As a result it was very difficult to develop for, as opposed to normal Palm apps.
It was a Palm with:
Tons of RAM
Great form factor
Dual SD slots
Best display available for any Palm device for quite some time
*3D hardware acceleration* - the ONLY Palm device with that feature. Unfortunately, you couldn't use it with Tapwave's near-impossible-to-obtain SDK. If Tapwave had been more open with giving developers their SDK, there would have been MUCH better Zodiac-specific software support.
Unfortunately, Tapwave shot themselves in the foot with SDK licensing. They didn't have the leverage that Sony, Nintendo, etc. do over developers. Tapwave should've done everything they could have to get developers on board (read: Let anyone download the SDKs, just like with the basic PalmOS SDKs.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I bought a second a week after buying the first. The sound was better than my friends iPod and on par with his Shuffle. The New Guys tutorial over at tapland.com showed me how to get better than PSP quality movie playback from my DVDs. My Zodiac uses two 1gig SD cards, though you can use 2gig ones. The Zodiac turns heads with its looks, it feels great in your hand when you reach into your jacket pocket, smooth as a pebble. I use it as a PDA with a Think Outside infra red keyboard, as a laptop replacement. I download all the latest news and stories using Avantgo, ebooks. I play games with it using emulators and with the games made for it. It should have been marketed as a quality PDA and multimedia marvel, but there were too many kids on those already crowded streets, I guess. Had it had a dictation facility, a camera and a built in phone... and maybe a tv tuner and, yes, Linux, it would have been perfect. As it is, it's close enough to for this user. Look for a reliable seller on ebay. It's a design classic.
Bought mine after my Clie went back to Sony for the second time, and I noticed the battery wasn't quite getting me through my two-hour commute anymore. (NR70Z, 1st gen twist-and-flip).
Never got around to making a holster for the Zodiac, but it fits well enough in my old Pilot III / Handera one. Finally looked up the cheats for Doom II recently... Nice to have a half-gig of standard SD plus a pretty good game, I like the color screen... bit odd that the included Acid Solitaire tells me I do not have the ultimate, though, because it won't do transparency. That was a letdown.
So when my battery finally goes, what do I get next? Sony is out of the lineup, Pocket PC -- don't even think about that. What's left?
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
I agree. No one I know has ever heard of this device. Actually, I have seen a lot of Blackberry devices and a few Treos's, and some Handheld PC's, but never a Zodiac. Most likely if did not really have a market segment to sell to, and also not enough marketing to convince people that they needed to buy one.
Often just being good is not good enough. You have to create the impression/perception that your product is good.
I can't afford a sig!
Really... noone I know owns anything like it... it's a cool looking PDA that plays games, it has an ATI chip that decodes MPEG4 video in real time, it runs emulators, plays music, wakes me up in the morning, checks my email, serves as a TV remote, allow me to read books... I could go on forever :)
:)
Everyone I show it to falls in love with it, and the fact that you can't even buy it anymore only increases its appeal... those who compare it to the N-Gage and the PSP (even other PDAs) are simply missing the point.
To those complaining about lack of development tools, you can even write apps using OnboardC, there's plenty of open source Dev enviroments for Palm, and the Tapwave SDK, while designed to integrate with Codewarrior could actually be used with tools like GCC..
You can't play Transport Tycoon Deluxe on the PSP because it doesn't have a touchscreen, and the screen on the DS is too damn small... it's the perfect device to play strategy games on the go, period.
It's a real shame Tapwave failed to crack the market, because the Zodiac was, (is, whatever) one of the coolest handheld devices ever made
Consumers want phone (plus an organizer) or a gaming device (and a phone). Tapwave was not either a good phone or a gaming platform. I would think Danger will be next, it's an organizer that's a phone which emphasizes the wrong features. The Treo has it right (although it is a bit bulky and has some issues) as it is a phone with a very good organizer included. Maybe the new Motorola / MSFT phones will be successful as well, but don't underestimate MSFTs ability to over burden the OS and make the device so slow as to be useless.