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Originally Posted by mogui
I googled the Tapwave Zodiac and found a good review. I guess it would be an UMPC. |
I don't think of it that way. I depends on how you define things.
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The screen is wide enough to be a good eReader. I was happy to read that it ran the Palm OS. How does it stack up against the Palm T|X?
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Since I don't own a TX, that's hard for me to say authoritatively.
The major differences between the Zodiac and the TX as that the TX builds in Wifi, the TX has one card slot, the TX uses NVFS instead of normal RAM, and has a faster processor.
Tapwave was trying to create a device that was a handheld gaming device as well as PalmOS PDA. So it had things like an ATI W4200 chip with on chip display memory driving the screen, and Yamaha stereo sound with actual (tiny) stereo speakers on the device. The CPU is a 200mhz Motorola iMX, and the Zodiac 2 has 128MB or RAM. It has Bluetooth, but not Wifi. However, one of the SD card slots is SDIO, and mine has a Sandisk 256MB+Wifi card I can use when connectivity is needed. The SanDisk gets about 120-150K/sec download performance. Unfortunately, the available drivers only support WEP encryption, so I'm out of luck connecting to a site that uses WPA.
Because of the hand held gaming orientation, the Zodiac defaults to landscape mode. and substitutes a left-side joystick for the 5 Way Navigator found on things like the TX. It uses "old style" Palm PIM apps.
Most of the ebooks I have on the Zodiac are conversions from HTML for Plucker, an offline HTML viewer for PalmOS, but I also have eReader and MobiReader for material in their respective formats, plus PalmFiction, an open source viewer from a Russian develop, for Palm doc files, zText files, ASCII text files on a card, and RTF files (which it renders as text), as well as PalmPDF, an open source Palm PDF viewer for PDF files, and Documents to Go for handling Microsoft Word and Excel files.
The "killer app" for the Zodiac is TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player), a cross-platform, open source media player that hanfles AVI and MPEG video, MP3 and Ogg audio, and a variety of other things. The Palm port has support for the ATI chip in the Zodiac, and there are reams of information on Zodiac sites on the best way to rip DVDs to play on the Zodiac.
I have two 2GB cards in mine, but I also have the FAT32 driver installed, so I can upgrade to 4GB cards when needed, for 8GB of storage.
I got the Zodiac when my old TE was dying. I wanted a larger screen, more RAM, and a faster processor. Anything else was gravy. Correspondence with another Zodiac user convinced me it was a good candidate, and I got a used device on eBay. Getting things set up as I preferred took a little fiddling, as the gaming device background of the Zodiac caused some quirks. To produce a gaming device, Tapwave needed game developers to write for the platform. To allay developer concerns about piracy, Tapwave implemented a form of DRM. Apps that used advanced features of the Tapwave API had to be digitally signed to run. Once installed, they were locked to the device they were installed on, and could not be beamed to another Zodiac and run. For teh most part, this has not been an issue, but I have a few things I ran on the E that bombed on the Zodiac because they did something it didn't like.
Overall, I've been delighted. Had the TX been available when I was looking, I might have bought one. As it is, I'm glad I got what I did. Glad enough, in fact, that I bought two more when Tapwave's former third-party service center had a clearance sale, offering a reflashed demo unit and a unit sent back on an RMA as a source of spare parts for $125. I have three, just in case...
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Dennis