Buzz for the Tapwave Zodiac

Posted on October 21, 2003

Over at Jupiter, Michael Gartenberg has the first review I’ve seen of the intriguing Tapwave Zodiac PalmOS organizer/game device, and he really, really digs it:

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 display that 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.

I have to admit that the Zodiac sure looks compelling to me. It would be awfully cool to have a great organizer that also happened to play some kick-ass games. Maybe that’s my Inner Geek talking, but assuming that they can keep this thing from being an utter disaster a la the Nokia N-Gage, I might be in line to check it out…