TapWave Zodiac
The last “Zscaler Logo on a Weird, Old, or Obsolete Device” post highlighted a really odd PalmOS-based device, so I thought I’d follow it with another really odd PalmOS-based device: the amazing Tapwave Zodiac from 2003!
Tapwave was a small but highly-ambitious startup founded in May 2001 by former Palm executive Peng Lim and Byron Connell. With their deep Palm roots (Lim had served as Palm’s VP of Engineering, while Connell was Palm’s VP of Marketing and Product Management), the duo had some compelling ideas about Palm OS’s mostly-untapped gaming potential.
Despite the comparatively small size of their engineering team and the inherent challenges of growing a startup company, the Tapwave team brilliantly executed upon their vision. Their new device was dubbed the Zodiac, and it was a shocking leap forward for handheld gaming.
In short, the Zodiac was a gaming and multimedia-oriented platform based on PalmOS. It could run virtually any standard Palm app, but it could also run games customized for its powerful hardware. The specs of the Zodiac were significantly more advanced than the most popular handheld gaming platform of the time (the Nintendo Game Boy Advance), and included:
A bright, vivid touch-sensitive display running at 480x320 resolution
An analog joystick and numerous input buttons
A powerful Motorola ARM 9 processor, 128MB of RAM, and an ATI Imageon graphics accelerator
A sophisticated audio processor designed by Yamaha
Dual SD-card slots
Bluetooth for data syncing and wireless multiplayer gaming
A really elegant and comfortable-to-hold aluminum case
All that hardware horsepower was put to work with a small but impressive library of Zodiac games, including Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Spyhunter, Duke Nukem 3D, and Doom II.
Of course, this remarkable device was born to do something that literally no company in history has succeeded at: successfully competing with Nintendo for handheld game sales. Despite its advanced specs and fun games, Nintendo’s stranglehold on the handheld gaming market was just too much to overcome, and both Tapwave and the Zodiac faded away by summer of 2005.
I first saw the Zodiac in 2004 when I was a new Apple employee stationed inside the Apple shop at CompUSA, which happened to be one of the only retail chains carrying the Zodiac. I *desperately* wanted one, but by the time I could afford one, it was already discontinued and I bought a more affordable (and frankly, more boring) Palm TX. Thankfully, it only took me ~20 years to finally find a Zodiac of my own, via some lucky timing on eBay. Speaking as someone who has spent MANY hours playing Game Boy Advance games, I’m honestly really impressed by the Zodiac - I really think that if more people had experienced it during its brief lifespan, it really might have been a successful platform.
Oh well - at least I can share it with you all now! Have a great weekend everyone :-)
