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
..