Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And this thing right here is the
Tapwave Zodiac, released in October of 2003 for a price of $299 for this silver
model with 32 megabytes of RAM, known as the Zodiac 1. And $399 for a
black 128 meg model known as the Z2. So what is this?
Well the Zodiac was described by Tapwave as a "mobile entertainment console"
built specifically to appeal to gaming and technology enthusiasts aged 18 to 34
who have quote-unquote "outgrown a Game Boy and need a device
that can help organize their life." Hehe, yeah... more accurately it's a short-lived
and increasingly forgotten gaming focused personal data assistant, or PDA,
running a customized version of Palm OS 5.2T, and became one of the most
high-profile failures in early 2000s tech. In my mind the Xodiac
is right up there, or down there, with the Nokia N-Gage and the Gizmondo. Just
one of several of those failed devices from the early 2000s that attempted to
merge the features of handheld consoles and a PDA. But the main reason the Zodiac
stood out to me back then was because it ran Duke Nukem Mobile, a unique version
of Duke Nukem 3D originally made exclusively for the system. But more on
that in a bit because just looking at this packaging gives you a good idea
what Tapwave was trying in vain to accomplish. "Enjoy true console quality
gaming, listen to music, view photos, watch videos, take control with leading
organization tools, and customize it with thousands of Palm OS applications!" Yeah.
This mashup of PDAs and portable game consoles was not an uncommon idea at the
time and you know, it kind of made sense when it was announced in May of 2003. But
by the time it came out later that year it was making less sense month to month.
Let's start out with Tapwave Incorporated themselves, a company
founded in 2001 by ex-Palm executives with the goal of
producing a gaming device centered on the Palm operating system. And in case
you're not familiar, in 2001 Palm was practically on top of the world in terms
of mobile computing. Their PDAs bridged the gap between the functionality of a
laptop computer and the mobility of a contemporary cell phone, and Tapwave was
one of the many companies jumping on the bandwagon to do something fresh with the
platform. Which in the case of the zodiac was focusing on mobile gaming first and
foremost. Simple 2D games were already a good fit on Palm PDAs, with their color
touch screens providing a nice way to play Solitaire and various puzzle games.
But Tapwave took it a step beyond any other Palm OS device, and indeed further
than any portable game console. Keep in mind when Tapwave was putting together
the Zodiac the major handheld on the North American market was the Game Boy
Advance by Nintendo: a system that was great for games, no doubt, but seen by
some like those at Tapwave as being a bit "childish," and really couldn't hold a
candle to the multimedia capabilities of a PDA. So when Tapwave announced that the
Zodiac would combine all the software and multimedia and color touchscreen
stuff of a Palm OS 5 PDA with an analog joystick, 200 megahertz ARM 9
processor, ATI graphics, and wireless multiplayer, the gaming and technology
press were psyched! The Zodiac ended up winning all kinds of awards,
there were over 1,200 game developers reportedly signed up to make games for
it, and pre-orders started pouring in to Tapwae. The future was bright! And then
it wasn't. For one thing the Zodiac struggled with distribution, only being
sold through Tapwave's website during its launch window. And sales remained
glacially slow even when it started being sold in stores like CompUSA. And then
there were the games themselves, which were few and far between at best and
lackluster the rest of the time. Zodiac launched with a few recognizable IPs
like Duke Nukem, Doom, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but there were already other
games in these series available on the much cheaper Game Boy Advance. Then there
was the fact that the Zodiac was not alone, with Nokia's N-Gage releasing at
the same time while also including the ability to place phone calls and send
text messages. And the latter point was pretty important since the PDA market
was quickly moving away from dedicated PDAs and more
towards hybrid devices like the Treo 600, T-Mobile Sidekick, and the Blackberry
6210, giving the public an early intoxicating taste of what would become
known as the smartphone. While the Zodiac was stuck having to tether to a
cellphone a modem or a PC to go online, using infrared, Bluetooth, or a sync cable,
and didn't come with built-in Wi-Fi at all. And then finally you get the DS
hitting the scene in 2004, the Sony PSP set to launch in fall of 2005, and
cellphone games running on J2ME and BREW were just exploding, and so the writing
was on the wall. Tapwave only sold around 200,000 Zodiacs over its entire
time in the market and shut down all service and support for the device on
July 25th of 2005, and then selling off the rest of the company to an unknown
buyer. Well there's a mini Tech Tales for you, so let's go ahead and unbox this
device which I found complete (ish) on eBay a while back for about a hundred
bucks. And first up here in this little tray we get the Zodiac 1 itself. We'll
talk about the specifics of it more here in just a moment. And you get a
little baggy with some paperwork and manuals and presumably the software CD.
It was supposed to come with a CD of Windows software to do all of the
syncing and stuff like that on your PC. And yes it was originally just for
Windows, they released some Macintosh software later. I just downloaded a copy
of the software. Anyway the rest of it in here: you get some cables, this is the
charge and sync cable. So you get this end right here that plugs into the
device itself and then the other side can either be USB for doing all of the
syncing, or you can attach another piece and plug it into the wall to do
straight-up charging. You also get a little carrying strap, which, I never use
these things so I am leaving it in the plastic. And finally you get some truly
not comfortable Tapwave Zodiac earbud headphones. Eeeee, I don't like these, they
make my ear holes hurt. Alright let's talk about the device itself, and here it
is! It's a neat little thingy, weighing about 6.3 ounces or 178 grams.
And it's about on par with its contemporary Palm PDAs in terms of size.
But compared to a modern hybrid game console or even a modern
smartphone it is absolutely tiny, and looks charmingly dated with its bulbous
rounded blob shape. Ahh the early 2000s I almost miss this style of design, but
then I don't. Anyway underneath its little fold-over
leathery cover here you get a 3.8 inch backlit transflective LCD screen with a
resolution of just 480x320. And encasing everything is an anodized
aluminum shell. Yeah this thing is not plastic, it is aluminum, which feels
pretty solid in the hands I gotta say, I like that. Look at it a little bit closer
here and on the front you get the power button, a home button, an unmarked back
button, two tiny speaker holes, one on the left and one on the right, and then one
of the biggest selling points: the analog joystick over here. And it's pretty
decent to use with most games, but a little bit too slippery for my taste,
could have used some texture or something on the top. You also get four
rather gummy-feeling face buttons for interacting with menus and games and
such over here on the right, and then on the top you get two even gummier-feeling
shoulder buttons, seriously these things suck. There's a bit of a click when you
press them down but it's always a strange struggle to make it happen
reliably, especially if you have larger hands. I have issues with the cramped
Joy-Cons on the Switch for instance, but I would take that any day over the awful
cramping claw maneuver I have to pull off here. There's also the fact that the
flexible rubber on these buttons tends to fall apart as you can see. In fact
perishing rubber parts are a problem on these in several spots, like around back
where you're supposed to be able to hold the stylus. Yeah no, the little black
rubber bits just fall apart and the stylus no longer stays in there. I have
to use some sticky tack to hold it in place. You also get a spot on the back
for tying in carrying straps as well as a recessed reset button for resetting
things with a button. On top of the unit you get another button to enable or
disable the Bluetooth, as well as dual SD card slots used for either expanding the
storage or inserting game cards. Yep, Zodiac games were distributed on SD
[MMC] cards and came in these DVD-style keep cases. I only have these two games, Duke 3D and
Doom 2. Really any Zodiac games can be hard to find but the packaging is kinda
nice in a somewhat boring way. I was happy to find these. And finally along
the bottom you get a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack as well as a
spot to plug in the combination power-charging and sync cable. Speaking of
charging, there's a good chance the original battery in any given Zodiac is
dead, as mine was when I got it. Thankfully replacing it is pretty
friggin easy: you just unscrew four little Torx screws and then snap off the
back and there you go. You can just drop in a replacement 3.7 volt lithium-ion
battery pack, of which new ones that hold a full charge can be found surprisingly
easily online, as I'm making this video at least. And while we're in here check
out the chip running much of the show: the amusingly titled DragonBall MX-1 by
Motorola and Freescale Semiconductor. This ARM 209T-based system on a chip
replaces the old 68k-based DragonBall and integrates things like USB support,
LCD control, analog to digital conversion, and an SD card interface, all working
alongside the ATI Imageon W4200 graphics chipset. Okay, let's take a look
at what happens when you power on the Zodiac for the first time... *Tapwave sound plays*
Yay sound effects! All right, so the initial thing that you have to take care of is the
initial setup for the resistive touch screen. Yes this is not capacitive, you
can't just touch it lightly, you have to press down a bit and it is ideally used
with a stylus. And the calibration is the first thing that you'll be taking care of
as well as some calibration for the analog controller itself. Simple enough
stuff, there's just a few other things to choose like whether you are right or
left-handed, the date and the time and your timezone and stuff like that. And
then it lets you learn a bit about how Graffiti 2 works. And this, eh, it's supposed
to be one of those systems that makes it easier to have your handwriting turned
into text, but it's a little more specific than some others I've used.
There are only certain ways that you can write it out to have it converted into
text, that is unless you customize it yourself which I definitely would have
to do if I we're gonna be using this. I would much
rather just have a virtual keyboard and type that way, even though that's not
ideal either because the tiny little screen results in tiny little characters
to tap on. Either way you get a bunch of stuff that is pretty common across
almost any Palm OS 5 device, you know all that "adult" productivity software
that makes this so much more "grown-up" than a Game Boy, uh-huh. You can take memos,
you can enter dates into your calendar and make an itinerary, you can read
e-books if you were to go to Palmdigitalmedia.com and get an e-book, you can
calculate calculations using the calculator calculatingly, you can look at
photographs which is quite a nice thing to have had back then. Even though of
course, they are only at 480x320. And then probably the most fascinating stuff
for me were the video and music options. It used the Kinoma movie player by
default, which unless you were downloading stuff specifically for that
you'd have to get Kinoma Producer to convert stuff. Naturally, it also has a
built-in music application for playing MP3s and such, one of the biggest reasons
I wanted a device like this in the mid-2000s.
*Andrew Hulshult's LGR Theme remix plays*
And of course, you could play games! And well, it came with just a couple of them,
solitaire being one of those. It's a pretty decent little solitaire program,
but this is really not what you got this device for, you could play solitaire on
pretty much any PDA ever made. With the Zodiac, well, that was about the Zodiac
games. And as I mentioned earlier the biggest one that I wanted to get was
Duke Nukem Mobile because, at the time, this was the only way that you could
play this version of the game. It had its own exclusive levels and features and
all that kind of stuff. I didn't know anything about it really, I just saw the
screenshots and information on the 3D Realms website and thought it looked
awesome and I wanted it. But of course I never got it until adulthood and now I
am glad that I didn't waste my time because honestly, this is not a very good
game. It looks pretty good at least, a little bit better than Duke Nukem
Advance which was its contemporary. However the levels are extremely small,
you just get a bunch of enemies that are randomly teleporting in all the time,
there's no music, the stuff that each enemy drops is it doesn't make any sense
for what they're actually shooting. Like it's just a weird version of the game
and it is further letdown by the fact that the controls for this thing sucked!
Like I mean they're programmed fine, it works as its intended, it's just physically the
controls of the Zodiac are not suited to my hands. I feel like you'd have to be
like, 12 years old at most for this to make sense. And wasn't this supposed to
be the "adult's gaming portable?" Talk about a fatal flaw right off the bat!
Especially with first-person shooters. I also tried Doom 2 because of course that
is the other game for this that I own physically. And it's not much better, in
fact it is probably worse because this game is sped up significantly compared
to the MS-DOS original. It's just way too fast. The music is fast, everything moves
faster, the controls are way more responsive than they need to be. It's
just really tricky and as a result much harder to play. Still, portable Doom 2
would have been pretty friggin awesome at the time. But then again if I really
wanted that I would have gotten a Game Boy Advance. But there is one kind of
saving grace for the Zodiac and that is the fact that it is incredibly easy to
install your own homebrew and independent software that you
downloaded. And the hotsync capability is dead simple as you would expect for a
Palm OS 5 device. All you gotta do is install the Palm Desktop software
hotsync thingy from Tapwave and then press down the hotsync button on the cable or
cradle, which is the cable in this case, and there you go! It syncs everything
that's on the Zodiac itself to your PC and whatever you've told the PC to send
the to the Zodiac it'll do that too. And yeah the Palm Desktop hotsync software
makes it super easy: you just plop a file in there, hit sync, and there you go.
Or you can just copy things over directly to an SD card through an SD
card reader on any random PC and then insert it, and chances are if you've done
it correctly it'll work just fine. And yeah, there was a relatively significant
scene of people making their own games and porting source code for other games
and just making all sorts of cool stuff for the Zodiac. And of course, it can run
a crapload of Palm software as well. I am mostly interested in the Zodiac
specific stuff though since it takes advantage of its hardware in particular.
For example one program that was kind of a killer app for the Zodiac, if you can
say that it had one, and that was TCPMP or The Core Pocket Media Player. This is
available for all sorts of PDA kind of portable devices, but the version for the
Tapwave was pretty awesome since it provided hardware scaling for all kinds
of videos. Namely DivX which was very popular at the time, so if you were to
encode pretty much anything into DivX and put it on an SD card and play it
back through this you've got a neat little portable media player for
watching your favorite YouTube videos offline.
*LGR Thrifts theme plays*
And another option for moving around files that just highly amuses me is the
Bluetooth functionality. And yes due to the magic of legacy
backwards-compatibility goodness you can make the Tapwave Zodiac communicate
with a modern smart device. So I've got a 12 megapixel photograph taken on my
Galaxy Note 8 sending over Bluetooth to the Zodiac right here and there you go!
You can admire and edit your photographs right from the built-in software of the
Zodiac, even though it is pretty friggin slow because it's a giant picture. But
hey, it works! another realm that's fascinating to explore with the Zodiac
is the area of unreleased games that ended up getting leaked in the years
following the device's untimely demise. Like this version of Tomb Raider 1 and 2
that never got completed. And it makes sense that there are a good number of
unfinished games like this for the system since so many developers signed
on with high expectations, only to see the system fail spectacularly with the
gaming public. Kind of a shame too since the hardware itself really is quite
impressive for the blip in time that it existed. And this in-development Tomb
Raider build is a good example of that. Same with the homebrew emulator scene
which puts that 200 megahertz ARM processor to the test by emulating
classic computers arcade games and consoles.
*Sonic the Hedgehog 3 for the Sega Genesis attempts to play*
Sometimes poorly, but well it tries its best. A soft-modded PSP is still way
better in this respect if you're looking for mid 2000s portables with great
emulators, but I still find these programs fun to fiddle around with
regardless. And that's about it for this video on the Tapwave Zodiac! It's one of
the most fascinating tech failures that I remember watching. I really was
impressed when seeing the Zodiac reviews in magazines back then and I thought
having an analog joystick in a handheld was an amazing idea. I think its goals of
bringing console-like games to a smart device were admirable and
forward-thinking. The problems though were quite obvious: it was completely off
target, in terms of timing and execution for seemingly what most people wanted.
Add relatively pricey hardware, few worthwhile games, an increasing number of
competitors, and there's the fact that it lacked a built-in cellular data or Wi-Fi
connection. Tapwave attempted to remedy this in December of 2004 with a $100
Wi-Fi SD card accessory, but by then it was too late.
So it was promptly axed and the Tapwave Zodiac became just another odd little
thing in portable computing history, and its legacy is that it ended up being the
third worst-selling portable of all time with only the Gizmondo and the R-Zone
selling fewer units. You know you've got a stinker on your hands when even the
N-Gage sells 10 times as much. Yet it's precisely because of this failure that I
find the Zodiac so intriguing, and I hope that you enjoyed seeing it here on LGR.
And if you did enjoy the video then great! I have plenty more on retro
hardware and software so feel free to peruse my playlists or check back every
Monday and Friday for new stuff. And thank you very much for watching!