Reg Review Tapwave's Palm OS-based mobile games console, Zodiac, has been on sale in the US for ten months now, and the company feels it's time to take the handheld family to new customers in new territories. Europe's first on the list, and Tapwave popped over this month to give local hacks a look at the device.

The Register has been nagging Tapwave for a review unit for longer than Zodiac has been available, and with the European launch, I finally got my hands on one. Tapwave offers two Zodiac models, the Zodiac 1 and Zodiac 2 - all that separates them are their storage capacities (32MB and 128MB, respectively) and their colour (grey and black) - and I spent some time with the latter.

Tapwave can't be faulted for its hardware design. The Zodiac's highlight is its gorgeous 3.8in, 480 x 320 16-bit colour transflective LCD. It's not the brightest display I've seen, but without a doubt the best one on a games-oriented device. The screen is surrounded by an anodised aluminium shell that gives the Zodiac a solid, robust feel. On either side of the screen are stereo speakers and the controls: a console-style analog joystick, and on/off and Home buttons on the left-hand side, and a circular cluster of four coloured game buttons on the other.

Holding the Zodiac in two hands, the stick and game buttons are perfectly sited for thumb operation, while your two index fingers sit above to further buttons mounted flush with the casing in its unexpectedly slim top side. The unit is just 1.4cm thick. Face-on it's 14.3 x 7.9cm. The whole thing weighs an eminently portable 178.6g.

The base of the Zodiac is home to Tapwave's proprietary data and power connectors, and, on the far left-hand side, the 3.5mm earphone socket. The 'phones themselves have a curved jack mount which fits comfortably against both the curved edge of the Zodiac and your palm.

The Zodiac's screen is touch-sensitive - the stylus clips into a shallow recess on the back of the machine. Above it, Tapwave has placed a removable fold-over screen cover which also protects the two hot-swap MMC/SD slots mounted in the top of the device, and the Bluetooth activation button, which cutely pulses with blue light when pressed. One of the SD slots supports SD IO cards.

Inside the Zodiac is an Motorola ARM-compatible MXi processor clocked to 200MHz. There's a further 8MB of RAM dedicated to the ATI Imageon W4200 graphics accelerator. The sound is handled by a custom Yamaha chip.

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.

The game's afoot

Tapwave ships a couple of basic games with Zodiac - Stuntcar Extreme and Solitaire - but I was able to try a number of the commercial titles, including Doom 2, Duke Nukem Mobile Edition, SpyHunter, Tony Hawks Pro Skater, Apache vs Hind and a selection of past their use-by date... er... 'classic' Atari arcade games.

Playback is smooth and certainly felt like it was running at a reasonable frame rate, particularly on vertical scroller Firehammer and the Elite-esque 3D space shooter Galactic Realms. A nice touch is vibro feedback - the console shakes when you get thumped in Duke Nuke, for example. Alas not all the 30-odd titles available support this feature. Ditto the stereo audio, which definitely sounds better with phones than without.

I was less keen on Zodiac's analog controller, which I found too sensitive for someone as used to a keyboard and mouse as I am. But such reactions are common among gamers who try new types of input device. After a while, I started to get used to it. More to the point, it's unlikely to be a problem for console gamers proficient on analogue PS2 or Xbox controllers.

Then there are the games. Prices range from $10 to $30, and there's a reasonable mix of genres. Too many of them, however, are oldies that have simply been dusted down and put to work on a new platform. I'm always up for a Doom 2 session, but frankly I'd rather play in on a desktop, particularly since this version lacks the hi-res art seen on other platforms. Heck, the game looks worse than my old Mac version circa 1994. Ditto Duke Nuke.

Do you really want to pay top dollar for games that look no better than they did on an early-1990s PC?

In fact, playing the Zodiac doesn't feel much different from playing the Atari Lynx I used to own in the late 1980s. Yes, the screen's bigger, the machine is smaller, and CPU fast enough to push pixels around sufficiently quickly to render 3D games at reasonable frame rates on the big screen, the lack to a true 3D accelerator means the visuals remain locked in past decades, a feeling reinforced by all the old games.

Maybe Tapwave hopes that the cash-rich early adopters it's pursuing won't prove so fussy or have a nostalgic hankering for the games of their youth. But if it's to make it in the mainstream, Zodiac needs more modern titles. The Zodiac is a better mobile gaming machine than, say, Nokia's N-Gage QD, but the latter has an impressive list of top-of-the-line, up-to-the-minute titles. Maybe Nokia paid developers to port them, maybe not. Whatever the reason, N-Gage has lots of games people want to play. Zodiac doesn't.

Mark/Space Missing Sync for Palm OS 4.0 When PalmSource said it was dropping Mac OS X support from future Palm OS HotSync releases, Mac and Palm owners were worried. They needn't have been. Mark/Space's Missing Sync for Palm OS not only ensures ongoing Mac OS X-to-Palm OS sync support, but is arguably a better product than the official one. I turned to Missing Sync because Tapwave doesn't provide Mac OS X support out of the box. Set-up is as smooth as the installation process. Adding a new handheld - the software supports pretty much all the Palm OS devices made available thus far - produces a list of synchronisation conduits, enabled or disabled at the push of a button, and configured by double-clicking. A separate tab lists software and content that will be uploaded to the handheld's main memory or expansion cards, if fitted. First time round, Missing Sync installs and app of its own that cleverly mounts memory cards on the Mac's desktop, allowing you to copy files by drag and drop as if the connected device was just a memory card reader. The Palm OS app then removes all the hidden files Finder adds, saving space and keeping a card device friendly, and the card is exposed to iTunes and iPhoto to all relevant content to be copied across from within those apps. Speaking of Apple's software, Missing Sync also ties in with iSync and its related apps, iCal and Address Book. Alas, you still have to push A second app neatly synchronises the device's clock with that of the host Mac - almost worth the ticket price alone. I connected the Zodiac to my PowerBook with the bundled USB cable, but Missing Sync also supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi sync connections with the appropriate hardware. There's even a reminder facility for folk who too frequently forget to back-up their PDA. Alas, the current version doesn't include Tapwave's High Scores conduit, but Mark/Space tells that it's available separately and will be rolled into the upcoming 4.0.1 update due in a few weeks' time. Verdict Quiet apart from providing Mac OS X support for Palm OS-based devices that only ship with Windows, this is a more feature-packed and better integrated synchronisation tool than the one PalmOne currently offers. Device makers should bundle it. Missing Sync for Palm OS   Rating 90%   Pros — Broad support for Palm OS devices — Integrates with Apple iApps — Mounts expansion cards on the desktop   Cons — Key conduits need to be installed separately   Price $40   More info The Mark/Space site

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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