Tapwave Zodiac

» see tapwave.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the tapwave zodiac was not a product i could have bought in turkey. it shipped in north america in november 2003 at $299 for the 32mb sku and $399 for the 128mb one. palm pdas had a small market in turkey through corporate channels by then, but a gaming-focused palm device at that price point was a pure us-market gamble. the only people i knew with palm hardware were using tungsten t3s for outlook sync, not for emulator games.

tapwave was a small california company. the zodiac ran palm os 5.2 on a motorola arm9 at 200 mhz with an ati imageon graphics chip. the screen was a 480x320 transflective lcd, and twin analog controls with shoulder buttons distinguished it from a regular palm tungsten. tapwave called their os build 5.2t. for november 2003 hardware it was a serious gaming-class spec for a handheld.

the best-selling title on it was warfare incorporated from spiffcode, a real-time strategy game that had been a palm hit before the zodiac existed. a kinoma video player and an mp3 player came bundled in. for a brief window in 2004 the zodiac had a small developer ecosystem around it.

then sony pre-announced the psp at e3 2003, the same month the zodiac was unveiled. by march 2005 the psp was on shelves in japan. the nintendo ds had already launched in november 2004. the gaming pda market closed under both of them. tapwave ran out of funding in early 2005, laid off staff, and ended production on 31 july 2005 with about 50,000 units shipped across both skus.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the zodiac arrived with genuinely positive press. wired wrote about it as a palm os device that could finally compete with the gameboy advance on raw spec. pc magazine reviewed it as a legitimate gaming-class handheld. for a few months in early 2004 the zodiac looked like the device that would extend the palm os lifespan into a new use case after the pda category had stopped growing.

the actual problem was retail distribution. tapwave was selling through best buy and circuit city without enough marketing dollars to compete with the nintendo and sony machines that arrived a year later. the zodiac needed to establish itself before the ds and psp landed. it did not establish itself.

~ the unraveling ~

by late 2004 the developer ecosystem started thinning. palm os itself was in a slow visible decline. palmsource had split off from palmone and was failing to deliver palm os 6 cobalt to oems. when the zodiac was launched, palm os was the dominant pda platform. fourteen months later it was a stranded asset, with no clear future and no commitment from oems beyond the existing inventory.

tapwave had bet on palm os as the foundation. when palm os stopped being a viable foundation, the zodiac had nowhere to go.

~ what got buried with it ~

the zodiac is the artifact that captures what happened to palm in the early 2000s. palmone was still shipping a strong pda line, but had no answer to phones with software stacks. tapwave was trying to extend the palm os lifespan by giving it a gaming use case. it did not work. by 2007 palm os had no future at all. the iphone arrived in june of that year and the entire palm-pda category collapsed within two years.

the zodiac sits in the failed-handheld file alongside the [[n-gage]] and the [[gizmondo]], the 2003-2005 window that produced more failed gaming-class handhelds than any other window before or since. all three lost to the psp and the ds. the zodiac is the one with the strongest spec sheet of the three. it still lost the same way.

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