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..."

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.

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.

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.