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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."
It also looks like the gameboy advance (not the DS-appearing one). It isn't really that unique a design, so sure. Plenty of systems look like them.
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.
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.
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.