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DemoMobile to kick off with Palm's wireless games hand-held from Tapwave

Anybody wanting to get the first Palm based games console, can place the order on the Tapwave site tomorrow. The Tapwave Zodiac will star at DemoMobile in San Diego tomorrow. That gives Europeans their only advantage, because it won't be sold outside America for 12 months.

What is the Zodiac? "It has an MP3 player, a video viewer, a photo viewer, and the first ever analogue controller on a Palm device for games," said a source for Tapwave.

"But the nice thing is that you can multiplay games on it. It comes with Bluetooth built in, and a chat software program too. Oh, and you can even pick up email if you have a phone that connects to it."

Theoretically, you can order it from 7 AM Pacific time - or pre-order it. If you do, you'll have to do it nearly blind; there's a blanket embargo on details until after the DemoMobile launch tomorrow (Wednesday) in San Diego. And at launch time, the web site will be locked for pre-orders.

The good news is: there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. The bad news: I don't know what the price is!

Gamespy reports that: "Tapwave is filled with executives who had been key at Palm, including Peng Lim (ex-VP of worldwide product development) and Byron Connell (former VP of Consumer Markets Group and VP of marketing)."

More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that they know the channels. The sort of stores that carry Palm devices are, often, the sort that stock Gameboys and other portable beeping toys.

What it doesn't mean, is that they know the games software market, and so until we see the launch details, we'll have to take it on trust that there will be good games.

Screen resolution is the same as the top-end Sony Clie Palm variants: 480 pixels by 320 - half VGA. The display works in both portrait and landscape modes, depending on what you're running on it. And there's an eight megabyte video ram space, too.

Expansion is with two Secure Digital slots, one of which is SDIO, opening up the possibility of using WiFi as well as Bluetooth wireless.

Two versions of the Zodiac are expected; one with the pretty standard Palm configuration of 32 megabytes; and a big one, with 128 meg included. It looks like that's expandable with the SD socket, of course, which will almost certainly be able to load games.

Already, there's a (free) user group at Yahoo Groups, which had some 300 members earlier today.

The operating system is described as "an enhanced version of Palm OS 5.2" with Tapwave-derived extras to speed up downloads.

The founders call themselves "pioneers of a new category of mobile entertainment gear," and say they will be "changing the way people live, play and interact on the go."

The company was founded in May 2001, and says it is "developing a portfolio of innovative next-generation products tailored to deliver the most fun and function in mobile entertainment gear."

The illustration, according to Gearbits, was discovered on the FCC web site, as part of its application for approval.