From: Brian G. (briansnewton_at_gmail.com)
Date: Tue Aug 02 2005 - 03:47:10 PDT
On 8/2/05, Toby Hutton <tobyhutton_at_mac.com> wrote:
>=20
> Which one is your primary PDA? Do you still use the Newton?
The Zodiac is/has been my primary PDA since it replaced my Sony Clie
NX70V after Sony announced that they were departing the PDA market.
The Zodiac is as close to a mini-Newton as you can get.
Raj Patel wrote:
>Great post from Russel Beattie on his PSP experience and why Tapwaves
>price point meant it just wouldn't succeed (and why the PSP will) -
It's pretty ironic that Sony is adding more and more capabilities to
the PSP. The price point argument is a complicated one.
1. The Zodiac 1 with 32MB of RAM was originally priced at $299 and the
Z2 at $399. Now they're about $225 and $299 respectively.
2. When the Zodiac was being offered at bargain basement rates in the
UK as Tapwave started their death spiral (under $250 for the Z2)
people snapped them up and the increased UK Zodiac user base was
noticable in the community.
3. Sony can afford to lose money on each PSP unit sold, subsidizing
the low cost of the PSP through their deep pockets and through game
sales. Tapwave needed significant margins to make a profit and
therefore had to price the Zodiac to match comparable PDAs. Even at
the original price points, the Zodiac offered a lot of value when you
looked at its feature set. Now, almost two years since it came out,
the Zodiac still offers significant value and a competitive feature
set when compared to other Palm OS offerings.
In this post at Zodiac Gamer, Bob Ebert, one of the Zodiac's engineers
who also worked on the Newton, mentions that Tapwave was working to
port Linux to the Zodiac near the end and made significant progress.
"Now what you should *really* be asking for is the sources for our
most recent project, which was getting Linux up and running on the
Zodiac. That's another way the hardware could live on -- running an
open source OS."
Tapwave was showing a Zodiac running Linux at the recent PalmSource
DEVCON in San Jose.
I'd be even more interested in the Einstein project on the Zodiac.
Brian
--=20
Tapwave Zodiac 2 & Newton MessagePad 2100 Owner
Visit www.tapland.com, the first Zodiac community.
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