Tapwave, the third most popular Palmsource licensee behind Palm (and Sony in the past) and makers of the Zodiac PDA/gaming device, has gone out of business.
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Member since:The reason small startup companies like Tapwave bother to take on Nintendo is because we live in a free market society. If you have a product, that you believe performs a task better than an already existing product you can market that product to the people. If you're right, and your product is better, then the people will let you know by buying your product. Let's remember that a loooong time ago, Nintendo was a small startup company too. So was Sony, as far as video gaming and computers were concerned. Even Apple computer was a start-up who decided to take on IBM. Depending on who you talk to Apple is kicking IBM's ass.
Tapwave's main problem was marketing. They never figured out how to reach their target audience. I'm not sure they even knew who their target audience was. They weren't gonna get the people that buy mainly video games, we have PSP and DS for those people. They could have easily gotten the PDA buyers though. Let's face it, the LifeDrive from Palm is not the huge hit it was supposed to be. For $500 I can get a better handheld from a Pocket PC manufacturer. The T5 from Palm is a huge step backwards, and there are just too many hardware issues to go into there. The last decent handheld from Palm was the T3.
The Zodiac is the handheld that Palm should have made as their T5. Two expansion slots instead of one. Rotatable screen. Awesome gaming capabilities. Bluetooth, if they had included Wi-Fi with the right marketing, Zodiac would have been the handheld to have.
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Atari, Sega, NEC, Tiger, SNK, Bandai, Game Park and Tapwave all they have in common?
They've all been obliterated in the handheld market by Nintendo.
It takes an enormous amount of resources to take on a company that size, so you have to wonder why some of these companies even bother.