Tapwave Zodiac 2

Performance

To benchmark the Zodiac, I used Laurent Duveau's Speedy 3.4 and Kinoma Player 2.0, which has its own performance testing option.

Speedy's suite calculation, memory and graphics tests put the Zodiac fractionally behind the PalmOne Zire 72 - 0.64s, 0.13s and 0.26s, respectively, compared to the 72's 0.49s, 0.12s and 0.25s. The first two pairs of figures are unsurprising given the 72's higher clock speed (312MHz to 200MHz), but the graphics test is unfair since it makes use standard Palm OS APIs and ignores the Zodiac's graphics accelerator. You can see this with Kinoma Player, too. Our test movie ran at 182.3fps, rather slower than the 487.88fps we got of the Zire 72.

Figures like these might give the impression that Zodiac is slow. It isn't - both loading and playing games and other applications felt quick and responsive. Given the kinds of games it's likely to be running, it's certainly as fast as it needs to be, and there's probably headroom in the hardware to support more advanced games going forward.

At this point, I was going to discuss battery life, but the test unit sadly shuffled off its mortal coil, refusing to reset or charge up. I'd been having a number of problems with it - reset-requiring crashes, blast of white noise through the speakers - so its demise was not entirely unexpected. Likely, I had a faulty unit - there's certainly nothing to suggest endemic problems with Tapwave's hardware.

Playing a selection of MP3s over and over saw the battery fall from full to around 20 per cent in over five hours. For gaming, the lifespan will be somewhat lower - primarily because the screen backlight would stay turned on; dimming the screen will help - but without a full test it's hard to say to what figure it would fall. Various reports around the web suggest its 1540mAh battery yields three to four hours, tops.

Verdict

The Zodiac 2 is undoubtedly a fine piece of hardware, that offers the best mobile gaming experience I've had. It's certainly hard not to recommend the Zodiac to PDA owners who are also keen gamers. There's no doubt it's better than a PDA at gaming, and on a par with other such gadgets at all the personal information management stuff. If you're in the market for a PDA and you know you'll want to play games on it, do take a look at the Zodiac.

Gamers should try it too. Tapwave's hardware beats the N-Gage, GameBoy line-up and a pre-production Gizmondo I've seen. It stands up well against the PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS, though I'd not bet on it achieved anything like the market share they will.

Crucially, Zodiac desperately needs a better games library. Without one it may end up being known more as a PDA that's good at games rather than a console with a knack for PIM facilities and multimedia. That would be an unfair categorisation - Zodiac is very definitely a games machine and a damn one, too.

I've seen many such devices try, and many die. Zodiac may not be able to out-gun with the big guys, but it deserves to survive. ®

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