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ran Duke Nukem Mobile, a unique version of Duke Nukem 3D originally made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!
