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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."
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
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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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
"You can always spot the pioneers by the arrows in their backs."
--William Calvin
Pretty Please?
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
pfft.
If it was a Sony product, Konami would've developed a Metal Gear game for it. Polyphony Digital would've worked on a Gran Turismo game for it. Rockstar would've made a Grand Theft Auto game for it. Etc, etc. For a hand held that's been out over a year than the PSP has, it sure has a sucky game line up on the shelves. The PSP hasn't been on the shelves for a year in Japan and already it has a stronger following, and it's not even been out in the states for more than 6 or 7 months and it too, also has a stronger following.
It's not a matter of Sony bias either. Even though I own a PSP, I still use my DS for GBA games, I still use my NeoGeo Pocket Color, and I'm trying to track down a Turbo Express.
It's more than just 3rd parties(OK, Polyphony digital isn't exactly a 3rd party...), or marketing, it's also attitude. The Zodiac wasn't sold in the gaming section of my local Fry's, it was in the PDA section, and had no games on display. Something tells me this wasn't Fry's decision to label it was a PDA, but it could've been. In either case, there's something about it's design that absolutely screams that it wasn't built by people who were interested in building a solid gaming machine first. The OS, the build of the machine and even the stylus didn't seem like it was seriously built for gaming. The controller felt really weird when using it, I couldn't imagine using it with something like a fighting game where you'd need to do weird motions like f,d,df(before people yell at me, this is an input command for some of the moves in Darkstalkers, not the dragon punch in the street fighter series).
The focus on gaming is important if you're going to compare it to the PSP as a gaming platform. If it's really a hybrid multimedia machine/pda/game player, then it's not comparable to the PSP. Even though it does media capabilities, who the hell are we kidding, it's a gaming device.
The lack of WiFi but the inclusion of bluetooth worried me. I had a wifi router, PC with wifi, and even my PSP and DS had wifi, but I didn't own anything with blutooth in it.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I respectfully disagree with this statement. There were many things that killed the Zodiac. A few of them are:
I wanted to love this thing. I tried. I lusted after it from day one until they got it into CompUSA. Once I tried it, I lost most of my interest. Once I tried to develop for it, I lost all my interest and bought a PocketPC from Dell for about half the price... Plus playing for more than two or three minutes made my hands hurt...