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of Duke Nukem 3D originally made exclusively for the system.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