COMPARISON: N-Gage VS Gizmondo VS Tapwave Zodiac

[fishsandwich]

The DS reigns supreme, the PSP is Queen, and the GBA is still the little prince to hosts of youngsters.

No one talks about the old regime much anymore, especially the Tiger Gizmondo, Tapwave Zodiac, and Nokia N-Gage. All of these has-been handhelds are considered failures, some more than others. Are they still worthy of your time and attention? Absolutely! I thought I’d compare them just for the hell of it. Keep in mind I know very little about technical stuff and coding so your results may vary. I wrote this in about 2 hours and I skipped over A LOT of details, especially the particular features of each device. Consider this a jumping-off point.


THE CONTENDERS

N-Gage by Nokia. Cell phone/game device

Zodiac by Tapwave. Palm-based PDA designed for gaming.

Gizmondo by Tiger Telematics. Do-it-all handheld



DESIGN

The Tapwave wins hands-down with its elegant design and slim profile. The Gizmondo it a bit too cluttered and thick to be considered a successful design plus it has too many angles on what could have been a clean design. The N-Gage is available in two different versions. The first generation model makes a better handheld but looks a bit odd to some folks. The second generation model is nicer-looking but is too small for adult hands. The numeric keypads for both N-gage models do double-duty as action buttons. The N-Gage is unusual in that the screen is vertically oriented (taller than it is wide)… great for traditional shooters, no so great for most everything else.

Winner: Tapwave
2nd: Gizmondo
3rd: N-gage 1st gen


BUILD QUALITY

Again, the Tapwave reigns supreme. Construction quality is superb and feels very much like a well-constructed piece of high-end electronics. Its metal case and solid feel set it apart from the others. It's also the only handheld in this group with a stylus. It slides out of of a compartment in the back, somewhat like a DS. The Gizmondo is surprisingly well-built with a mixture of metal and high-quality plastics. The 1st gen N-Gage feels a bit too lightweight and has a cheap plastic feel to it but mine has held up well under a lot of use. The 2nd gen N-Gage was obviously redesigned with cost-cutting in mind. The keypad is less substantial than the earlier model and it has a lot of cheap-feeling rubber on it. The rubber seal that joins the two main pieces will invariably loosen with time and will need to be replaced.

Winner: Tapwave
2nd: Gizmondo
3rd: N-gage 1st gen


SCREEN

No surprises here. The Tapwave is king with its wonderfully large and bright 480 x 320 3.8” screen. It's also the only one of the three handhelds with a touch screen. The Gizmondo comes in second with a 240 x 320 2.08” screen. The N-Gage comes in a distant third with its 176 x 208 2.1” screen. The 2nd gen N-Gage’s screen is noticeably brighter than the 1st version, one of the few areas where the 2nd gen is better than the original.

Winner: Tapwave
2nd: Gizmondo
3rd: N-gage 2nd gen


CONTROL

This category is where it gets dirty. The Gizmondo sports a nice digital pad and good-feeling buttons but its thick shape takes some getting used to. The N-Gage 1st generation also has a nice digital pad but no dedicated buttons... you use the regular numerical keyboard. A couple of the most-used buttons are molded for better feel and the large variety of buttons trumps the other two handhelds but it's a pain in the ass to use more than a couple of the buttons for any game. The small 2nd generation N-Gage will make all but the smallest hands sore and cramped with extended use. The Zodiac has nice buttons and shoulder controls but the analog nub takes a rather long period of adjustment as opposed to the digital controls of the other two. It works well for many of the Zodiac-specific games and makes an excellent pointer but it doesn't work quite so well with the emulators that had digital inputs (which is about all of them).

Winner: Gizmondo (barely)
2nd: Taopwave
3rd: N-gage 1st gen


BATTERY LIFE

None of these handhelds can hope to compete with the DS or GBA when it comes to battery power. The N-Gage fares the best with 5-6 hours of full-on play time with full sound with the 2nd generation being a bit more energy-efficient as well as a bit brighter. The Zodiac is pushing it to get 4 hours with the light turned up high. The Gizmondo is lucky to go a full 3 hours before needing a charge. All three take their time booting up and turning off with the Gizmondo being both the slowest and the most prone to crashing.

Winner: N-Gage 2nd gen
2nd: Zodiac
3rd: Gizmondo


STORAGE

All three devices were at the mercy of piracy due to their choice of storage media. The Zodiac uses standard SD cards while the N-Gage uses the unpopular (but still easy to get online) MMC format. The Gizmondo can use either format. Note that the Zodiac was released with two different internal memory sizes... the Zodiac 1 has 32 megs while the Zodiac 2 has 128 megs. The difference is not apparent when it comes to playing the released games but it can make quite a differance when running the boatload of Palm software that is available.

Winner: Gizmondo
2nd: Tapwave
3rd: N-Gage


EXTRA FEATURES

All three of these gizmos go WAY beyond Nintendo. The Gizmondo can function as a GPS, digital camera, and e-mail device. The Zodiac has a wi-fi attachment and is a fully-functioning Palm device. The N-Gage can be used as a full-time phone (particularly the non side-talking 2nd gen) but the 2nd gen lacks the built-in MP3 player of the original (not a problem with software). All three can play music and videos.

Winner: Tapwave
2nd: Gizmondo
3rd: N-gage 1st gen


GRAPHICS

The Gizmondo is the clear winner here with graphics that sit somewhere between the DS and the PSP. It’s very doubtful that any game truly pushes the Gizmondo’s hardware anywhere near its limit but it might be capable of early Dreamcast-quality visuals. The PSone-like Zodiac and N-Gage are a closer match with the Zodiac’s faster CPU and dedicated 2-D GPU beating out the N-Gage’s slower CPU and dedicated 3-D GPU. The Zodiac’s specialized hardware was never truly utilized while the N-Gage was pushed much further and harder.

Winner: Gizmondo
2nd: Tapwave
3rd: N-Gage


SOUND

I generally have the sound turned down low on my handhelds so I can’t really judge this one.

Disqualified


LIBRARY OF RELEASED GAMES

This is the most lopsided of all the categories with the N-Gage winning hands-down on all counts including quality and quantity. The N-Gage has a surprisingly robust and varied library of 56 games with titles in most major categories, some of them (especially the later releases) being quite excellent. The Gizmondo has 14 commercially available games with a goodly number of stinkers. The Tapwave brings up the rear with a whopping 8 released games, most of which are unimpressive. It's become quite difficult to get complete games for the Gizmondo and Tapwave while the N-gage games are cheap and plentiful.

Winner: N-Gage (by a mile)
2nd: Gizmondo
3rd: Tapwave


LIBRARY OF PLAYABLE UNRELEASED DEMOS/GAMES

The Gizmondo has a surprisingly robust number of decent games, some of which are pretty complete. Ball Busters, Carmageddon, Chicane, Hit & Myth, Conflict: Vietnam, and particularly the GTA3 clone Colors are all very playable and possibly even great fun. The N-Gage runs a distant second with Atari 2, Shadowborn, and Taito Memories being the best while Virtua Cop and Alien Front are surprisingly short and disappointing. The Tapwave’s most exciting entries are a FPS based on the Terminator movies and two of the original Tomb Raider games. about it.

Winner: Gizmondo
2nd: N-Gage
3rd: Tapwave


DEMOS, PORTS, AND EXTRA GAMES

This category is far more important than many realize. Case in point: The Zodiac will play almost any game designed for the Palm platform. The sun is certainly setting on the Palm horizon but there are still a HUGE number of games and applications available for it. The N-Gage is a Symbian 60 device and there are lots of games for it, too. The Gizmondo is in the crapper on this one (though it’s supposedly fairly easy to port some older PC applications to the Gizmondo if you have the time and the skill). The Tapwave is by far the most supported device of the trio due to its Palm operating system.

Winner: Tapwave
2nd: N-Gage
3rd: Gizmondo


EMULATION

Being a Palm device, the Zodiac naturally has a great selection of fast emulators for a large variety of platforms. Most of the 8-bits and 16-bits are covered, MAME runs many games flawlessly, and there was even a stab at a PSX emulator. The Tapwave is particularly well-suited to SNES emulation due to its button layout. The N-Gage isn’t so great with the 16-bit systems but it does 8-bit just fine and is well-suited for true portable gaming. There are several decent emulators available for the Gizmondo but they aren’t optimized for the hardware. None of the three has a very active emulation scene anymore but the Gizmondo is particularly dead due to its low installed base.

Winner: Tapwave
2nd: N-Gage
3rd: Gizmondo


HISTORY

All of these handhelds make great conversation pieces, but nothing can top the Gizmondo in terms of sheer entertainment value. If you haven’t heard the sordid tales of illegal guns, jail time, massive fraud, organized crime, and near-priceless wrecked Ferraris then you must go to Wikipedia this moment. The N-Gage is interesting due to its highly publicized failure and hilarious (now forgotten) “side-talking” website. The Zodiac is more sad than interesting as it’s a truly nice piece of hardware that just didn’t sell.

Winner: Gizmondo (wow)
2nd: N-Gage
3rd: Tapwave


COLLECTIBILITY

This category is where it gets complicated and the winner is much more subjective, depending on your collecting goals. The Gizmondo sold less than 25,000 units total and some of the games are highly collectible. Good luck finding one of the Hit & Myth protos or the USA GPS software. Keep in mind that the Gizmondo was a MASSIVE failure and there just MIGHT be a cache of NOS just waiting to be discovered. UK games are much easier to find than their domestic counterparts... the North American games with ESRB ratings on the front are a bear to find. Note that the Gizmondo console came in two flavors... a regular version and a version that cost less initially but had ads sent to it via wireless connection. The "Smart Adds" service was never activated and both versions of system are otherwise identical. The Tapwave sold less than 200,000 units but I hear you can still find a new one if you look hard enough. The 128meg version is obviously more desirable than the 32meg base model. GTS Racing and Tiger Team Apache are the two most difficult to find games and have some collector value due to their cheap-looking early NES-style box art. Nokia sold at least 3,000,000 N-Gages around the world, making it much more common. If you compare the price of some N-Gage games to a small bag of potting soil at The Home Depot, you will discover that many N-Gage games are, in fact, cheaper than dirt. There are a few collectible games though, most of which appeared at the end of the N-Gage’s lifetime and were available exclusively online at the very shitty Letstalk.com. It is important to note that Nokia sent out A LOT of collectible promotional material for the N-gage including a funky non-working plastic model with a fake screen and lots of not-for-resale games. The N-gage is surprisingly collectible if you are looking for all of the various crap that made it out to stores and game reviewers. Note that the "Gold" branded preview games and not-for-resale cards, while certainly more collectible than the normal versions, are still much more common that you would think.

Winner: Gizmondo
2nd: N-gage
3rd: Zodiac


THE WINNER

Can you really pick a winner out of this group? It’s not very easy. The N-Gage is the obvious choice when it comes to the library of released games and the plentiful Symbian 60 software but the screen is tiny, the controls are troublesome, and the emulation doesn’t go much past 8-bit. The Zodiac has the worst selection of system-specific games (both released and unreleased) but has a huge number of Palm games, great emulators, and the most elegant design of the trio. It also is the only one with an analog controller which is both good and bad. The Gizmondo has a small number of playable games and has almost zero fan support but it has some really great unreleased games and (by far) the most powerful, hackable hardware. If I MUST choose, I have to go with…

Winner: Tapwave (barely)
2nd: N-Gage
3rd: Gizmondo




..

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

The Gizmondo story might even just get weirder if the rumors floating around for the past few weeks about the system being re-introduced to the market later this year turn out to be true.

Thanks for this writeup. I'm not at all interested in the N-Gage because the design just looks way too uncomfortable for gaming, but the other two have always tempted me. Especially because I'm a huge fan of homebrew and emulation and even better on handhelds. The prices for either system when they were new were both way too high, though, and by the time the prices for used units were coming down, the DS Lite was out, so I just got that instead.

The DS has been great for homebrew as well, just as I expected it would, but the temptation to buy another handheld persists, especially one that has that little bit of extra juice to handle MAME and SNES emulation better and more homebrew games is alwasy nice, too. I would just snap up a GP2X, but the reports about the crappy joystick have kept me back and now the redesigned unit seems to have four separate buttons a la the Wonderswan instead of an actual dpad, which sounds even worse if anything. for anyone here that has a GP2X, what do you think of the joystick? In abstract, it sounds similar to the Neo Geo Pocket clicky stick, but that's the bare none the best directional input device I've ever used, so I'm assuming the GP2X stick falls way short of it. Also, how does the GP2X stick compare to the GP32 stick?

The Zodiac sounds nice for emulators and Palm games and ports, but with only an analog stick, I can't see emulation of classic consoles being that great. And 480x320 resolution sounds like it would be a problem, too. Really like the build quality aspect, though. I'd love to have something really tough that I could treat like shit and bang around and not have to worry about. Just like the old days. Systems now are so fucking pansy ass.

After reading your post, the Gizmondo does sound better than I had previously thought. What's the dpad like on it? And are the available emulators full speed in your experience?

Thanks again for the comparison and for reminding me of these systems. I'd more or less forgotten about them and had only been considering a GP2X any more.


...word is bondage...

[venturousviking]

This is a nice educational comparison. Educational for me anyway as I have never heard of a Tapwave. Had to check Wikipedia to even see what it was..

[Trebuken]

I have not been able to get into these systems though i did have fun collecting the n-gage collection since it was fairly cheap. I have to find a few of the Gizmondo and Zodiac games but I have the most common ones.

I have been wondering if many of the downloadable only N-gage games are worth having, possibly creating my own carts with MMC (is that right) media cards, one for each...

Anyways, could/should the GP2X or it's predecessor be included here as well? I have yet to pick one of them up, but would really like to...

[neuropolitique]

You should put EDGE in one of the software categories for the Tapwave. I am fairly certain it was written specifically for the Tapwave. It can be found HERE.

I have to agree with everything overall. The Tapwave is a great little machine. The analog stick takes some getting used to. I'm not a huge fan of PalmOS, but it works. Using mine as an ebook reader lately.

[Steve W]

I have never, ever liked the Zodiac's stupid little analog joynub. It makes games like Duke Nukem 3D and Doom unplayable. That's pretty much the reason I don't mess with my Tapwave too much, other than to play a good game of solitaire.

The Gizmondo was a bizarre little device that had loads of potential. Who knows what kind of games GPS could be utilized with if the thing had caught on. Separating online groups through geography to act as gangs in games like Colors was a pretty cool idea. There was one game that the publisher gave up on that would have been some kind of GPS based real-world driving/exploration game. It sounded good, but I guess the programmers decided that a year or two after the death of the console wasn't a good time to publish such a thing.

The N-Gage was another potentially good machine that should have done better than it eventually did. First off, a bad design for the first one screwed up it's appeal for a lot of people. Having to take out the battery to put in a new game card was a mind-numbingly stupid design decision. It was little more than a glorified Symbian OS phone, so it's games could be hacked and run on regular Symbian phones. They should have put a little more custom hardware inside to improve the graphics. And of course, the dreaded 'side-talking'. The later QD model did improve things, but the machine was already the mockery of the game industry. And the original launch titles were pretty much abysmal. A couple Playstation 1 ports (Tomb Raider, Pandemonium) and some games that looked like freeware computer games (Bomberman, Puyo Pop, Puzzle Bobble) didn't do much to convince people to pick it up. Later releases got pretty damn good for the N-Gage, but the first ones just made the game playing public disregard it. It's a shame, since it's the platform that should have really taken off. But Nokia will never be able to launch a dedicated game phone now, since nobody will ever let them forget about the N-Gage's failure, and all it's drawbacks.

I have all three handhelds, and yet I don't own either a DS or a PSP. I'm not a fan of 'mainstream' handhelds, and I've yet to find anything on the DS or PSP that I really want to play. Whereas with the N-Gage, Gizmondo, and the Tapwave, their uniqueness was enough to get me to pull the proverbial trigger and buy one. In fact, this article is inspiring me to pull out my Gizmondo and play one of my favorite puzzle games of all time, Sticky Balls. Embarassing name, great game.

[Deadman]

Don't forget that according to last month's "GamesTM" magazine (from UK) the Nokia N-Gage is far from dead. The actual phones may be gone, but they are working now to bring the name back in a whole new set of phones and games.

So, the story doesn't end here...

[Trebuken]

Also, the Tapwave (I believe) was used on Stargate SG-1 as a 'tricorder' or somesuch device...

[Steve W]

I've noticed seeing the Zodiac on Stargate in the past. I've also seen a Gizmondo on a commercial for a videogame programming course at at technical school. Haven't seen an N-Gage in the media. I did however see a woman side-talking on one in a grocery store not too long after it's release.

[modest9797]

They all suck.

But you get Sticky Balls with the Gizmondo.

EDIT: Sticky Balls is a game. that sounded wrong.

[jennatar]

Gizmondo specs (from press pamphlet): ARM9 400 MHz processor / GSM tri-band / GPRS Class 10 / SiRF GPS / TFT screen ~ 240 x 320 pixels / WAP 2.0 / Picture Messaging / MP3 playback / Polyphonic MIDI / SMS/EMS / MPEG-4 playback / JPEG camera / SD flash card reader / Mini-USB client / Bluetooth class 2 for multiplayer gaming / 3D games capability / GPS tracking application / GPS mapping application / Removable SIM card / Removable battery / Polyphonic ring tones / Stereo headset socket for MP3 and games / Stop game play when battery near empty / Windows Media Player 9 / Flight Mode / Speaker / Vibrate Mode

[SpaceHarrier]

I had no idea there were that many games available for the N-Gage.. wow

[NeoTechni]

I loved my tapwave, used it as a PDA till I got an ipod touch.

The Zodiac is much MUCH better than the DS

[tom]

N-Gage is an excellent little gaming handheld. The games are really of very good quality and playability. Also loved the 'taco' phone usage, made everyone around you look up and notice :-)
Atari 2 was officially released, btw.
Actually, I reckon the first N-Gage is of best built quality as it included a radio, MP3 playback and USB connection, features removed from QD. N-Gage is easy to hold and feels very comfortable too. The screen layout is great and works well with all games.

Here's my complete N-Gage collection (55 released games, 1 pack-in (Flo Boarding), 1 game included with pack-in CD (Space Impact), 1 official d/l to buy (Payload), 1 official free d/l (Snakes)):
http://www.videogamecollectors.com/g..._itemId=192136

.

[alexander4488]

I own both the N-Gage and Gizmondo. I don't think the Zodiac is really a portable game console. Anyway, I'd say they're both equal. Actually, all consoles are equal without games because they're just plastic and metal. It's the games that should be compared. Anyway, like all consoles, they have their good and bad games. N-Gage has 3D Snakes which I heard was very good, but I have yet to play it. Gizmondo has Trailblazer and a few other games; Trailblazer is one of the best games I've ever played because of its precise control and super fast speed. Like Metroid (in ball form) in a 3D Sonic game moving in one direction. Something like that.

[SPAZ-12]

Nice writeup.

You seem to have a typo here:

The Zodiac <Gizmondo?> is in the crapper on this one (though it’s supposedly fairly easy to port some older PC applications to the Gizmondo if you have the time and the skill).

Or maybe you meant to say that? Anyways, nice little writeup. I'd love to get any one (all) of these, but the systems themselves don't seem to be very cheap.

[NeoTechni]

I don't think the Zodiac is really a portable game console.

It is. They took a palm pda, added dedicated gaming hardware (GPU, controls) a GUI to launch games off proprietary cards, a bluetooth mode just for multiplayer with other Zodiacs. The thing is more a portable gaming console than ipod touch/iphone could ever claim to be in a million years.

It's just like how Dreamcast had Windows CE, GP32 had Linux, etc.

Actually, all consoles are equal without games because they're just plastic and metal.

I disagree. Added functionality like homebrew support and multimedia capabilities make it more than just that. Take away the games on Zodiac/PSP/PS3/etc, and you still have use for them. DS/Wii, not so much.

It's the games that should be compared.

And games are limited by the hardware they run on.
Think of hardware like the canvas for a painting

[BetaWolf47]

It's worth mentioning that both the Zodiac and the Gizmondo have two models. One model of the Gizmondo has ads, which I thought was ridiculous, as it still cost over $200.

Also, why is GP32 not included in this comparison? Though it's main audience is homebrew enthusiasts, it does have commercial games.

[Steve W]

Well, there's no difference between the Gizmondo that had ads and the one that didn't. I bought the 'adds' version, but I wouldn't have ever gotten any ads because I screwed up the SIM card installation process, doing the procedure in the wrong order. Therefore I couldn't use the SIM card to go online or text message or receive ads.

[Damaniel]

I found my old N-Gage QD in a drawer a few days ago and decided that I wanted to finish my collection for it, so I've been buying up some of the games I'm missing. I was a big fan while I was using it as a phone, and bought about half the releases when you could still buy them in stores (many of them while Gamestop was clearing them out for $2-$3 each). I stopped using it around the time that the games became letstalk exclusives, so I only ever picked up Catan that way. Does anyone know how rare those last releases (especially Civilization) are, and how much they tend to sell for?

As for the Gizmondo, I wanted one really bad, but the price, the lack of games and the whole controversy over the ad-based versions kept me from taking the plunge. I'll still probably start working on a collection as soon as I finish putting together a complete N-Gage set.