Thursday, July 28, 2005
Tapwave Kills The Zodiac
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "THE COMPETITION" @ 02:00 PM
http://www.tapwave.com/
"We are sorry to inform you that the Zodiac business was discontinued and service and support are no longer available as of July 25th 2005." Well, that is a pretty brutal way to find out your device manufacturer is dropping the platform. Given the liquidators name at the bottom of the front page, "Ueker and Associates," I'd say this is a bankruptcy and not just a discontinued device.
I never understood why someone came out with a dedicated gaming machine based on a PDA platform, and a rather anemic one at that. I have no clue what they were thinking. Nokia tried this and failed. You have to have a ton of money and lots of stamina to stick around long enough to get a new gaming platform running now, or have something so totally new it blows people away. TapWave had neither. I feel bad for owners of this device. My understanding is games had to be signed to take full advantage of the platform. Unless TapWave releases the signing keys, there won't be anymore games for the platform.
"We are sorry to inform you that the Zodiac business was discontinued and service and support are no longer available as of July 25th 2005." Well, that is a pretty brutal way to find out your device manufacturer is dropping the platform. Given the liquidators name at the bottom of the front page, "Ueker and Associates," I'd say this is a bankruptcy and not just a discontinued device.
I never understood why someone came out with a dedicated gaming machine based on a PDA platform, and a rather anemic one at that. I have no clue what they were thinking. Nokia tried this and failed. You have to have a ton of money and lots of stamina to stick around long enough to get a new gaming platform running now, or have something so totally new it blows people away. TapWave had neither. I feel bad for owners of this device. My understanding is games had to be signed to take full advantage of the platform. Unless TapWave releases the signing keys, there won't be anymore games for the platform.
