Unlike the mainstream Palm PDAs like the Tungsten series and the Sony

Alarms
Unlike the mainstream Palm PDAs like the Tungsten series and the Sony Clie series, the Zodiac had some unique features out of the box. Its alarms were polyphonic quality, sounding even richer and more realistic than current PDAs. The Zodiac can even play MP3's for alarms (a ROM update fixed the limit of being able to play only the first minute of an MP3 track).


Music
MP3's can be played off either of its 2 SD cards or internal memory (being the Zodiac 2 was the first PDA then and still one of the few Palm PDAs now to have over 100MB of user available RAM, this was quite feasible and convenient). While other Palm devices can also do this, they require 3rd party software like RAMdisk to enable MP3 playback off internal memory and Pocket Tunes to associate MP3s with alarms. The Zodiac uses the music player that's preloaded in ROM for normal use playback.


Input
The system includes a standard touch screen (at 480x320, one of the highest resolutions available at the time) but has additional inputs designed for gaming. Held in a landscape configuration, there is an analog thumbstick and a function button on the left of the screen, four digital buttons on the right, and two shoulder buttons (triggers) on the top of the device. The unit accepts SD format cards as removable storage. The Zodiac's implementation of Palm OS 5 has a radial menu (the analog stick is pushed in one of eight directions to select menu options) with a side list for use without the stylus.

Gaming
While PDAs like the Tungsten T3 and certain Sony Clies also have alarm vibration, the Zodiac is the only Palm PDA to use this feature for PDA games as well. Many of these games were Zodiac exclusive titles (in other words, not available for standard Palm OS handhelds), but some titles also available for standard Palm OS handhelds also had vibration feature added in. These were added via a separate install file for Zodiac handhelds or a global file with an option to turn this on if the game detected you were playing on a Zodiac. There is multiplayer mode which uses bluetooth, 8 players max. for most games.