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."

Comments

An answer looking for a problem

[raydobbs]

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.

Re:An answer looking for a problem

[djrogers]

If I want a game system that's pocket portable, I will play with my PSP (better library of games, better gaming platform).

The zodiac was on the market for a couple of years before the PSP - for a long time it had by far the best screen and graphics available in a pocket...

If I want a PDA, I will use my HP hx4705 (VGA screen, better support by 3rd party programmers, better power management).

Not sure where you're getting your information - you do realize this thing runs Palm-frickin'-OS, right? There are so many stinkin' 3rd party apps for these it's unbelievable. And power management? Hunh? Where on earth did you get the idea that was a problem?

Re:An answer looking for a problem

[maethlin]

Absolute truth... the only thing that killed the Zodiac was lack of marketing. If you took that EXACT same device and had the sony name brand and marketing behind it, half the known world would own one and would be exclaiming what a fantastic gadget it was. If people could remove their sony-bias for a moment, they'd see that the PSP isn't really all that exciting (no touch screen, no internal storage, etc.) Ya it's a decent gaming device, but hardly revolutionary if you consider how long ago the Tapwave came out.

Re:An answer looking for a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure where you're getting your information - you do realize this thing runs Palm-frickin'-OS, right?

You do realise that you had to pull teeth to get the developer's SDK for the machine? They had custom hardware (including 3D acceleration) that was above and beyond "standard" Palm hardware. If you only wanted to write standard Palm apps, you wouldn't be interested in the Zodiac. But Tapwave treated the Zodiac-specific bits of the Palm OS like some sort of magic secret that they'd only give to anybody on pain of death.

For example, I'm a game developer (published on PC, Xbox & PS2). I wanted to play around with the SDK in my spare time and see if it might be worth buying a machine, but I gave up because it was going to be more hassle that it was worth getting it (note that this was not for official development, so I wasn't going to waste time on it). End result: I, and many others, never bothered giving the Zodiac a second glance.

I'm looking forward to the first Direct3D capable Windows Mobile 5.0 device that has a PSP-ish form factor and is designed with games in mind - I'll be all over that. Because the documentation is already freely available and Microsoft treats developers - even only potential developers - with at least a tiny amount of respect.

Re:An answer looking for a problem

[praxis22]

Now that is Absolute truth. I have a Zodiac, and a PSP. The Sony needs to be coddled and protected. The Zodiac takes the bus like the rest of the tech in my wife's bag. The PSP is gorgeous, I'm not knocking that, but it's a toy, not a tool. There is something very utiliterian about the Zodiac, a "can do" feel to it, and the touch screen makes all the difference. Just like my DS, it's like night and day between the two. The zodiac is also a lot smaller and slimmer, and the screen, while less dazzling than the PSP's is just as sharp, and I suspect, far more energy efficient.

It really is a wonderful gadget, and of course it'll run all your palm apps, simply drop your SD card into the slot and off you go, no need to convert, munge and massage your data, etc. Less of "an answer looking for a problem" more of a tool waiting to be used. For anyone with a Palm who whishes it could do more, and do it better, this was your upgrade.

Here's it's replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

Standard Response

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

"I hope they do the right thing and open-source the code..."

PDA/Gaming

[Nightspirit]

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.

Re:Possible Theory

[NanoGator]

"My theory is that it tried to go toe to toe with Nintendo and the GBA."

They did? Has anybody ever seen an ad for a Zodiac (or even a game review) in the popular game mags out there? Has anybody ever seen one at a store like Walmart or Best Buy? Can anybody point out a must-have killer game for that system?

I've got a dollar that says more people know about Tiger's Game.com system than about Zodiac. If it can't even pass those tests, how could it even think of going toe to toe with Nintendo?

Re:Smart Phones?

[faedle]

I was in your camp, until I got a PalmOne Treo 600.

Acceptable battery life, a usable camera, and (at least the GSM model) a good usable phone. Plus, having all the data service I can eat on my provider means that I'm always on IM and have instant and perpetual accesss to my E-mail (both with good third-party apps).

And, I only have to carry one device.

Nokia's phones are notorious at being lousy cameras and PDAs. But, to Palm's credit, the Treo made me a believer in the concept. It is, indeed, possible to get enough usability out of one device to make it worthwhile.

My thoughts on the "Zod"...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Tapwave, we hardly knew ye...

[jdigriz]

Yes, I bought one about 3 months ago at a serious discount. It's a good platform. I bought it primarily as a pda with games being secondary. Game performance is adequate I guess, not a lot of titles made specifically for it, but plenty of Palm OS games work on it. I liked the 2 SD slots, the large color screen (my last Palm was a Visor Pro by handspring) and the surprisingly good speakers. I disliked the graffiti 2 (damn that lawsuit! Bring back the original!) but the virtual writing area is quite good and a nice innovation. The 128 MB inernal ram seemed huge after my 8mb visor.The landscape formfactor is excellent for reading ebooks and the speakers are loud enough to enjoy music and podcasts. I keep a streetmap sd card and a 1gb sd card in it for storage. Thought about getting a wifi card for it, but I think the browser/processor combo is too slow to make for comfortable web access. The only real complaint I have with it is the USB/charging cable and the poor OS X support. The cable is a weird nonstandard connector that attaches awkardly and does not always stay attached. Overall, I'm not sorry I bought it, it's rugged as all hell and will last me a few years, and Palm OS isn't going away any time soon. I don't need "support", I'm a technology professional.I knew the writing was on the wall though when I saw the poor job of promotion the company did. A better marketing team could have pulled it off. Another Amiga.

Nice machine, shame to see them close.

[praxis22]

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." :)

Re:Meh. IMHO DRM helped kill this

[Miamicanes]

OK, question... was there any provision for allowing open-source thirdparty apps that used the Zodiac's API and hardware extensions to be promiscuously signed and made available for free at no cost to anyone who wanted to download them? Or, at best, would the developer have been forced to eat some licensing and/or service fee for his altruism? Or worse, be forced to pay Tapwave royalties for each and every download that someone needed to have signed for his machine?

Put another way, was there an option for a developer writing a Zodiac-specific app to do the equivilent of generating an anonymous J2SE code-signing cert and using it to sign apps for free use by anyone willing to accept the validity of the cert? Or would nothing short of a digital signature from a cert traceable all the way back to Tapwave, with some kind of metered licensing fees, have been good enough?

Re:Tapwave, we hardly knew ye...

[Divide By Zero]

I'll pass on the "ahead of its time" thing.

I bought this a couple years ago at full retail, which was like $300. I've never regretted a minute of it. Selling points:

PalmOS handheld device. Lots and LOTS of software, quite a bit for free or cheap.

SLIM. Half an inch thick, maybe. Goes in my jeans pocket no problem. Easy to carry around.

Game oriented. Analog stick, six buttons, horizontal orientation by default. While the first-party games did suck a fair bit of ass, and second-party support (www.crimsonfire.com and a couple others) was sparse, this thing was BUILT FOR EMULATION. I have SNES, Genesis, NES, GB, GBC and all my legal copies of backup roms for all those systems. Everything from Double Dribble through Golden Axe and Chrono Trigger, and all put together they take up a quarter of the memory. Plus, the de rigeur card games, including a couple decent Hold 'Em games.

Media friendly. The screen has the wide (480x320) aspect, and built in picture and movie viewers and an OS-integrated MP3 player. It's not an iPod-killer by any stretch, but it does the job well.

The memory thing was a bit lame (I got the memory-heavy version), but it's got two SD slots to more than make up for it. I never missed wi-fi, as I find PDA surfing frustrating.

I got one, showed it to a guy I worked with (same demographic) and he bought one. It's not a bad device by any stretch. Serves the need I had: to put work and play on the same pocket-friendly device.

Locking down the extra Zodiac-ey features, specifically the analog stick, didn't help, but it wasn't what killed Tapwave.

The marketing is EXACTLY what went wrong. The Zodiac was marketed as a fancy-ass game platform. They looked like they were going for 12-25, but it was custom built for technophiles age 25-40 who want to play games without carrying around an extra gadget. It's hard to pass off that GBA at work, but my Zodiac passes muster as soon as I show the boss my to-do list, address book, calendar, and all the other standard Palm apps. Sitting in meetings, taking notes looks just like playing Hold 'Em if I can manage to keep from looking disappointed when I get busted out. I'm really surprised the Slashdot people didn't pick up on it more.

My next PDA will probably be much faster with a lot of whiz-bang features, but I will miss the Zodiac when it's gone. Hopefully Tapwave will release the application signing algorithm and we can use it for more while the device still has its developers available.

Re:Meh. IMHO DRM helped kill this

[Andy Dodd]

"and it shares uncanny resemblances to the new Sony PSP DRM (someone copied)."

And that's the exact problem. Sony is a massive company that's well-established in the industry. If the Sony executives had said to potential developers, "Perform fellatio on every single one of us if you want us to give you an SDK", the developers would've done so.

Tapwave, on the other hand, was a tiny no-name company with no leverage. To succeed, Tapwave would've had to do everything in their power to *encourage* developers to come to their platform. Instead, they instituted a DRM scheme that made a few developers happy, but drove a far larger number away. Thus, the Tapwave had almost no software support other than "normal" PalmOS apps which would've run better on other Palm units with faster processors and/or more features that made those units more attractive in the Zodiac's target market.

Remove the nice 3-D acceleration and all of the nice Tapwave-specific features, and what was left gets totally eclipsed by more functional PalmOS devices such as the Treo 650 or even the T600. (Given a choice of ONE PalmOS device, I would just barely take my current T600 over the Zodiac. I would take the 650 over a Zodiac in a heartbeat.)