Tapwave Zodiac – First Impressions

Michael Gartenberg | October 21, 2003, 07:33 AM

Most converged devices don’t work. The reason is that in the effort for convergence, the sum is often less than the combined parts and each individual part isn’t very good. Look at PDA/Cell phones. You often neither get a great PDA or a great phone. The overall experience is compromised and you constantly face trade-offs in screen sizes and battery life. This is exactly why the Zodiac works. You get a great PDA. All the specs that a cutting edge unit requires; a 3.8 inch transflective displaythat does 480 x 320 (half VGA) with both portrait and landscape modes. A 200mhz ARM processor, Bluetooth for connectivity. But the Zodiac is also a great game device. In addition to the above features it adds two SD slots for memory, games and peripherals, an ATI® Imageon™ W4200 graphics accelerator (with 8MB dedicated SDRAM), a Yamaha® audio chip, an analog joy stick and to power it all two High-capacity Rechargeable Lithium Batteries – 1540 mAh so battery life is not an issue. In short, it’s a great PDA and a great game platform.

Hardware is nothing without software and in addition to the usual Palm organizer functions that Zodiac adds a music player, a program for displaying digital pictures and bundles the Kinoma player and producer for video. They also toss in a copy of the excellent Wordsmith word processor and a PowerOne graphing calculator. That makes for a pretty good PDA bundle. But the Zodiac also does games and that is where this device breaks from the pack. While all the classic Palm games work well on the device and there are some that can even take advantage of the wide screen, the device shines when it plays titles that were written for the platform. I have been playing two of them, Stunt Car Extreme and Spy Hunter. Both use the Fathammer engine for 3D and play very well. The difference in control with the analog pad is amazing. Spy Hunter in particular is fantastic. A direct port of the PS2 version, it play just like it and the graphics and sound are very close to Playstation quality. This is mobile gaming done right.

There are some glitches. The device is larger than your average PDA (but it is very thin and that mitigates this issue a lot). My pre-production unit has a cover that refuses to stay on. hopeflly, that will probably be fixed in shipping units. There are also some software glitches. Some Palm programs simply don’t like the Zodiac hardware. Documents to Go crashes the unit if you touch the joystick while it is running. The Zodiac also uses a different format to store some user settings so program like BackupMan won’t work. It will back up your unit but if you restore you will lose your HotSync name which can mess up some programs that are registered to it. Also, as one of three different devices using high resolution plus displays, the folks at Tapwave are going to have to evangelize developers to support their device.

Bottom line, if you want a cutting edge PDA, that is also a great game platform, the Zodiac is the device for you. No other device at the moment delivers both a compelling PDA AND Entertainment experience. And that can justify the $300 price tag. Does this mean the Gameboy advance is in trouble? Not likely. As a $99 dedicated gaming device with thousands of titles, Gameboy Advance will continue to meet the needs of its audience. The devices really don't compete as they target different consumers at different price points.

I’ll have some more on the Zodiac over the next few weeks as some more titles trickle in and we see support for some of the multi-player features over Bluetooth.