Tapwave Zodiac 2

User Interface

Running on top of all this is Palm OS 5.2. Tapwave has added its own UI, which converts the classic Palm OS icon Categories into folders on the Home screen. The main UI shows a wheel of eight icons on the left-hand side of the screen and a vertical list of smaller icons on the right. You drag your favourite eight icons to the wheel and the rest stay on the right. The colour scheme can be customised, and your own backdrop image added.

Running any of the Palm OS' own apps and utilities reveals the classic 320 x 320 UI on one side of the screen, with a virtual Graffiti 2 text entry area to the left or right of it, depending on whether you told the machine you were left- or right-handed when setting it up.

Like PalmOne's Tungsten T3, there's a strip of mini icons running down the far side of the screen, one to show or hides the Graffiti area, centring the Palm OS app, if necessary, and another to flip between landscape and portrait mode. The Zodiac remembers such selections on an app by app basis. The device's curvaceous casing makes holding it in portrait mode as comfortable as it is when you're playing a game in landscape mode.

Other mini icons take you to the Home screen - redundant this, given the Home button - or call up the menu, Find panel, an audio volume and screen brightness control panel, or the Zodiac's own MP3 player, Music, which can operate in the background. The sound's not at all bad, though the bass boost option alas only applies when you're listening on headphones, leaving the main speakers sounding a tad tinny.

Tapwave also bundles its own Photo application, along with Kinoma's Video player and PalmReader. The company is keen on this little suite of media apps since it believes listening to music, watching movies and browsing the family album on the move are going to be much in demand going forward. You get the Palm OS' usual PIM applications - though they lack many of the refinements PalmOne has made to them - along with a rather good alarm clock utility; WordSmith, a Word-compatible word processor; and InkStorm, a Bluetooth-based multi-user virtual whiteboard.

Bluetooth is also used to connect Zodiac to a mobile phone, for which Tapwave provides a web browser and an SMS messaging app. Oddly, there's no email app. Worse, Tapwave supports only three handsets directly - Nokia's 6310i, and Sony Ericsson's T68i and T616 - with others handled by a generic GSM driver. None of the handsets can be used in GPRS mode.