Tapwave Zodiac Reviewed

News from C&VG [br][br] The Tapwave Zodiac is a powerful fully featured PDA that is geared for games, with a graphics accelerator, an analogue joystick and shoulder buttons. It also plays MP3s and videos. The founders of Tapwave were original Palm employees from Engineering and Marketing, and as you might expect, the Zodiac is a slickly packaged device with good build quality, an excellent screen, and ergonomic controls. It has a very fast ARM processor. It has Bluetooth but no W-Fi. It does have two SDIO slots though, so Wi-Fi is easy to add with the appropriate card.[br]However good the hardware is, and it is very good, the success of the Zodiac depends entirely on the games that are released for it. Oddly I found that the classics I was expecting to get on with, Duke Nukem, Doom II, and Spyhunter, were not particularly compelling. On the other hand, while Pocket Mini Golf didn't look promising at first, it is weirdly addictive and good fun. Acid Solitaire, bundled with the machine, is superb. Stunt Car Extreme also has good replay value and shows the impressive graphics and sound performance that the machine is capable of.[br][br]One of the biggest names, Electronic Arts, has brought their Palm version of Madden NFL to the Zodiac. Wait, don't go - it's really good! It has all of the NFL teams and their logos are bang up-to-date! Actually it is a very good game - if you like American Football. There is no Fifa 2005 or Pro Evolution Soccer for it - it desperately needs this for the 4.8 billion people in the world who think football is a game played by men with round balls.[br][br]There's not a lot of 'name' software available for the Zodiac. No sign of The Sims, Fifa 2005, Tiger Woods Golf, or Need for Speed, all of which are either out for the NDS or scheduled for the PSP. Whilst the Zodiac won't have the massive backing of the big games companies that is promised for the PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS, it has a huge base of existing Palm software which is both varied and cheap. It doesn't have a killer game yet - one that will make you buy the unit just to play it.[br][br]Also, multi-player support for games is a bit thin on the ground, with even Madden 2005 players having to wait for multi-player support to be added at a future date. There are signs of good things to come, though, with games like Warfare Inc supporting multi-player gaming across different platforms - Palm, Zodiac and Pocket PC players can all connect up together.[br][br]The raw power of the ARM processor used in the Zodiac makes it perfect for running emulators. As well as the Atari classics available from the Tapwave store - including Asteroids, Missile Command and Centipede - the machine is well served by a wide range of emulator software. There are emulators for the Atari ST, Nintendo NES and SNES, Sega Master System, GameGear and Gameboy Advance, as well as Xcade, a classic arcade game emulator. There are at least as many more emulators available for the Palm which will inevitably have Zodiac support added - including ZX Spectrum and even the venerable Apple IIe.[br][br]The Zodiac is a good machine for the developer. Many development tools are available and PalmOS is a mature and well understood platform. You can buy excellent development tools from Metrowerks and it is also possible to use the open source GCC compiler. The first cross-platform development tools are coming out (Punk, from Extreme AI - not cheap!), allowing developers to author a game on a PC and instantly port it to the Zodiac Nintendo DS and PSP. If this is a success, it will put the mobile gaming focus where it should be - on the software.[br][br]The Zodiac is an extremely powerful mobile games machine. It has a large, good quality screen, vastly bigger than the Nokia N-Gage and even slightly bigger than the PSP (320x480 versus 176x208(!) and 272x480 respectively). In PDA terms, it's better specified than the top of the range Palm, and its screen is only equalled by the Tungsten T3 and T5. Only the four new VGA Pocket PCs (from Dell, HP, Asus and Fujitsu) have a better screen. [br][br]Current UK prices for the Zodiac are around 300. This makes it expensive for a games machine but competitively priced for a top-of-the-range PDA. Although games for the Zodiac are typically cheaper than the expected price of PSP and NDS games, the Zodiac unit price will have to drop - the PSP and NDS are both likely to be considerably cheaper than the current Zodiac price.[br][br]The Zodiac has everything but Wi-Fi and a VGA screen, and the battery life is excellent. It doesn't quite have everything you need in the box - you may need to add an email client - but it's got good software support and has been designed and marketed by experts who wrote the book on PDA usability. It also syncs with a Mac. It is a hugely versatile device and if anything survives against the PSP and NDS, this will be it. It's not going head-to-head against them, and that could save it. There are huge amounts of Palm software which will run on the Zodiac, and just one really decent game could make this machine thrive. Original mobile games are still thin on the ground for all platforms, so it is a level playing field for all developers, and the next really killer game probably won't come from anybody you've heard of. And for that reason I can't wait to see how it turns out.