The Gadgets Page

My favorite Palm I ever owned was the Tapwave Zodiac.

A full two years before the release of the Sony PSP, the Zodiac looked like it could be the perfect gaming platform. If only the game manufacturers wrote games for the Palm, the Zodiac would have had a HUGE jumpstart on both the PSP and the Nintendo DS. The only games I saw available for the Zodiac was Duke Nukem and Atari’s Adventure, but apparently there were a bunch of others: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4; Mototrax; Spyhunter; Madden NFL 2005; DOOM II; and Warfare Incorporated.

Not only was it a good gaming machine, it had EXCELLENT video conversion to play videos. Before the iPhone was even a glimmer in Steve Job’s eye, I was watching bit torrented episodes of television on my Zodiac during my lunch break every day at work. I could also listen to MP3s using their media player. When my Zodiac finally had to be sold, I truly missed the media capabilities it had and was frustrated to no end that I couldn’t recreate that experience with my Palm Treo.

Of course, the Zodiac had all the normal Palm capabilities that any other Palm device had at the time, so there was a calendar, contact manager, notes and to-do list. I loved that I could do everything that my old Palm used to do AND watch videos on it. It wasn’t until I bought my iPhone four years later that I FINALLY was able to have the same capabilities as I had with the Zodiac.

Sadly, Tapwave had serious problems. Not only did they discontinue the Zodiac in 2005, but they also stopped supporting their warranties on their older models. I had severe problems with the directional pad on my first Zodiac. I sent it in to be repaired. It took several months to come back to me. We feared that we might never get it back because the company seemed to be going out of business. When it finally returned, we sold the returned model.

It came with all this stuff:

I loved my Zodiac and I wish Tapwave could have survived long enough to become a dominating company in the gaming market instead of a fond memory and a footnote.