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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."
If the Zodiac is no more, then what do I say, if someone asks me what my sign is?
*sits here, watching the following thread for the puns and fun answers*
Luke
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Have a teaching-about-computer-basics website? Maybe you might want to swap links with ChristianNerds.com?
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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..
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.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...