Games In Your Palm

By Wilson Rothman

The Zodiac is the latest bad boy to challenge Game Boy on its own turf. The new handheld combines a Palm organizer with vivid-video games and comes fully equipped with a hot graphics accelerator, analog joystick and high-res LCD screen. Designed by former Palm engineers at the Mountain View, Calif., start-up Tapwave, the Zodiac will be available for preorder on Sept. 17 at tapwave.com ($299 for 32 MB of internal flash memory and $399 for 128 MB). Greater entities than this have tried and failed to trump the mighty Game Boy, but Tapwave is stacking its deck. At launch, Midway's Spyhunter, Activision's Tony Hawk 4 and as many as 15 other games will be on sale online. The system also runs standard Palm apps and games. Battery life, which is critical, is anywhere from 5 hours to 15 hours, depending on the game. Our advice: keep the power cord handy. --By W.R.