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LGR - The Tapwave Zodiac: 2003's Gaming PDA (Patreon)

Published:
2018-03-12 18:19:25
Edited:
2018-03-12 18:19:26
Imported:
2021-03

Content

Now here's a little beast I've wanted to talk about for ages! Finally got a boxed one on eBay a little while ago and made the time to really dive into it, and yeah: I can see why it's one of the worst-selling handheld games consoles of all time. But I also really enjoy messing around with it regardless.

Also, now that I'm diving into the Palm OS environment for the first time (I was always into PocketPC in the past) I already have another device or two from that ecosystem to cover on LGR. And lemme know if you have any requests for particularly fascinating Palm devices!

Files

LGR - Tapwave Zodiac PDA Review

2003 was a strange year for tech

Comments

Anonymous

They aren't PalmOS devices, but I'd love to see you do a retrospective on the N-Gage and/or Gizmondo.

LazyGameReviews
>>10749922

I'd love to get those to cover! I do have some N-Gage games already so I just need the complete set of hardware. The Gizmondo will prove much more difficult to find complete (and costly, probably.)

Anonymous

A full Tech Tales on Palm (and 3com) would be super fascinating to see.

Anonymous

Good Stuff Clint - Keep em coming

LazyGameReviews
>>10750296

It's certainly a topic I'd like to dive into a bit further, yeah! Admittedly a company I don't know much about other than their products and eventual demise.

Anonymous

Good gravy. I didn’t even know this thing existed. And I was a Palm OS fan. Through many PDAs through to the Treo 650.... and then I got a Crackberry. Lol.

Ezydenias

I love those cable, so easy to repair or to replace. Whos bright idea was this fucked up power cable?

Anonymous

That earbud ad :D

Anonymous

That makes me miss my HP Jornada. I used to use that for portable emulation (and taking notes in college with my nifty foldable keyboard) all of the time back in the early 2000s. Never ended up playing any real PocketPC games on it though.

Anonymous

Dude! Gorgeous panning shots and beautiful bokeh balls on those coffee shop shots as well! Lovely device, I'm all about portable gaming, so I cannot tell you how much I loved this.

Anonymous

I was convinced the Zodiac was going to be the next big thing when it came out. Then my buddy got one and we were both really disappointed with the games. I ended up buying a GP32 BLU which itself wasn't perfect but it was a pretty neat little device.

Anonymous

The "outgrown a GameBoy" blurb is a telltale sign that these people don't understand the audience for this sort of device. No wonder it didn't do well.

moosemaimer

I had one of those Garmin iQue devices from 5:04! Organize your life and then navigate there! Except it had no flash memory so if the battery died (and it did, all the time) it effectively underwent a factory reset. I decided to save $100 by getting the one with no WiFi or Bluetooth, and then wound up spending $80 on a WiFi SD card adapter because it wasn't very useful without the tether cable. And man was that GPS slow.

LazyGameReviews
>>10751309

Thank you, those were actually shot on my phone! Wild to me that I can get shots like that with a device in my pocket these days :) Glad you enjoyed.

LazyGameReviews
>>10751603

Seriously though, they really doubled down on that idea for whatever reason. Rather silly in retrospect.

Anonymous

The Zodiac is such a cool little device. It's a shame it never took off. I'm sure that was mostly due to the high price and lack of developer support. I actually recently contacted the head producer from Tapwave and he told me they had a “good beta” of Neverwinter Nights running on the Zodiac before funding ran out. I’m hoping I can track it down. I would love to see it running. The disintegrating rubber is definitely a bummer as well. I actually made 3D-printed replacements for the stylus clips though and they work even better than the originals. I might have to attempt the same thing with the shoulder buttons at some point as well. <a href="https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2812536" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2812536</a>

Anonymous

I spent so much time in class playing games on my well out of date Palm IIIxe in 7th grade. This would have been an absolute riot for me. Incidentally I didnt learn much in 7th grade but I was always happier playing a game.

LazyGameReviews
>>10751668

Ahh that small point in time where wifi was an option that legitimately seemed like it might not be worth paying extra to have. The mid 2000s were amusing.

LazyGameReviews
>>10752230

Man, high school would have been a LOT different if I had a Palm device of any kind, haha. So many wasted study halls, I'm sure.

LazyGameReviews
>>10751475

Always wanted a GP32 BLU for its homebrew and emulation capabilities! I actually had idea it had any commercially-released games for it until just now while looking it up again.

LazyGameReviews
>>10751079

Always though that those looked fantastic, but I ended up getting an iPaq instead in 2005 or so. I also really like the older Jornada systems that look like tiny laptops.

Anonymous

Great review as always. I would have boycotted it just for the principal back then as I loved my GBA. It made my daily commute such a pleasure.

Anonymous

As a GP32 owner at the time I was desperate for a Zodiac but I waited it out for the GP2X which got way more “scene” support in the end and was a great little system. That said it’s great to take a look at this system again and when I saw you were playing around with it on Twitter I couldn’t wait to see the video. Was not disappointed.

avfusion

The other commentators touched on everything, I wanted to. But I did want to pass along my appreciation of your vanity shots. I don't know why, but seeing the Zodiac sitting out in the middle of a city block looked cool.

LazyGameReviews
>>10756385

Glad you enjoyed it! And man, I still wanna grab a GP2X someday, was always this close to getting one. Ended up going with a modded PSP-2000 instead

Joon Choi

Man Clint this video must have taken weeks to put together! Great stuff.

Wrestling With Gaming

Another great video man. To echo someone else's comment, loved the shots of the zodiac

Anonymous

Great video! You mentioned the games came on SD cards. I was wondering if they're standard SD cards? What happens if you put them in a regular computer?

Mac84

I always wanted one of these, although it would have been cool back in the day, I ended up waiting. Which was great because I eventually got an NGage QD as my first cell phone. Even with its odd portrait display there were some decent emulators available which had mixed results depending on the system. I’m looking forward to more Palm videos! My first was a clear-case IIIe and my last was a Palm Treo 650. I always loved using mine as a universal remote during school days haha.

Anonymous

* Blast processing not included

Anonymous

I was big into Palm stuff in the early 2000s. A couple of devices to check out: - The top end Sony Cliés: NX-70, NZ-90 and the tiny laptop-like UX-50 - If you want to go oldschool, there's a bunch of interesting Handspring devices from the late 90's. These were basically older Palm OS devices (monochrome 160x160 screens for example) with an unusual expansion slot (for installing expansions using a slot), with stuff like modems, wireless, cameras, audio and more You got into it a little bit in the video, but the way that Palm OS worked with syncing was very different compared to Pocket PCs of the time (which were more like Windows machines complete with installers, uninstallers, viruses, antiviruses, etc.) Of course I would love to see a big Tech Tales for Palm, including its inception, growth in popularity, eventual move to smartphones to compete with Pocket PC and BlackBerry, eventual decline, reincarnation with WebOS and the Palm Pre, second decline and eventual sell to HP, and now with WebOS being the OS of LG TVs (where OSes go to die). Looking at the impact of Palm's software and hardware on modern devices is pretty fascinating (reminding me of the General Magic video). This is true both for the original Palm OS (basically inventing modern PIM apps) and for Web OS (with multitasking concepts for example taken almost verbatim into Android, iOS).

Anonymous

Hey mate, I'm sure this an exceptionally stupid question so I beg of your knowledge.. And patience haha.. Why do you need to attach the other part of the cable to charge it? when the end for syncing is USB? can it not charge through that from the device it's plugged into? Stupid I'm sure but I'm rather curious and no one else asked, though I'm sure for obvious reasons ;)

Stephen Staver

Man.... I had a PDA in my first year of highschool (Probably right around this same timeframe) thinking it was the coolest thing ever. AcidSolitaire was my favorite thing. Years later, I was excited to see they had an iPhone version. Even though it was very expensive. Until a price drop. But then they stopped updating it. So it is impossible to install it on the latest version of iOS. :(

Anonymous

That's aluminum? I really thought it was plastic! That early 2000 shape is kind of misleading the perception of the material. "I almost missed this style of design. And then I don't." Ahahah I share that feeling. It has as much value as it is weird compared to the modern design style. Compared to your smartphone it is baffling! Love the shots with the Switch, your smartphone, on the bricks and in the city.

BastetFurry

Pah! Humbug! The nGage QD was and is the best phone Nokia ever made, for example which other mobile gaming platform has a full blown official Civilization port? And if Nokia didn't sucked at marketing a gaming handheld Big N would have had a hard time. Regarding the Zodiac, the more i see it the more the Palm fan in me wants one. :D

Tktagmedia

Back in the day I was torn between this and the GP32, a South Korean gaming device that promised Linux on the go. In retrospect, I'm glad I held-out for the GP32. There was a much more active homebrew community surrounding it.

Anonymous

This was an excellent piece… especially with that mini-Tech Tales bonus. I never got on board the Palm train (I went for a conventional S60 device once a low-end one was a thing… partially because of the shadier options available. I do remember reading about the Zodiac, but considering their… distribution issues in the States, it was no surprise that they weren't gonna make it to Oz. It's a shame though, as honestly… if they got out a bit earlier, and improved the buttons &amp; thumbstick… it honestly would have made for a far nicer device than the nGage. That's for sure. Plus, having a landscape aspect screen wouldn't have hurt, either!

Anonymous

Hey Clint, cover Gizmondo! Thanks!

Steve Martin

Ugh, I pre-ordered one of these on a credit card, while in college. On the gaming side, it blew. However, for the time, despite the fact that I'd have to zoom in to read them panel to panel, I used to read pirated scans of comic books on it, when I had breaks and even when I went to concerts.

LazyGameReviews
>>10795425

Haha, nice! I attempted to read some ebooks on my HP iPaq back then. Definitely a bit of an eye strain, but doable.

LazyGameReviews
>>10769092

As far as I know, the USB connection is only used to sync to the PC and doesn't do much (if anything) for charging. Still, even if it does slowly charge the device, it's pretty common for Palm PDAs to include a separate adapter for the wall like that, and I assume Tapwave just decided to combine the two into one cable.

LazyGameReviews
>>10762465

They show up exactly like a normal SD card! So you get a directory listing with all the game files and subdirectories.

Anonymous

Man, I wanted one of these SO bad when I was younger. I'm glad I never ended up getting one now.