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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."
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..
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
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.
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.
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.
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.