[2] ZETA was an effort to bring BeOS up to date, adding support for newer hardware, and features that had been introduced in other operating systems in the years since Be Incorporated ceased development in 2001.

However, some critics point to a list of goals for the first release that do not appear to have been met (including Java 1.4.2 and ODBC support).

Other reviewers point to bugs that still exist from BeOS, and question whether yellowTAB has the complete access to the source code they would need to make significant updates.

[3] YellowTAB promoted ZETA mainly in the German market, where it used to be sold through infomercials and on RTL Shop, and in Japan still being a beta version.

The operating system ZETA was published before the appearance of the final version 1,0 as Release Candidates (RC).

Starting from 24 June ZETA 1.0 was in the distribution; on the company-owned Website the spreading of the version 1.0 was officially confirmed on 1 July 2005.

Furthermore, critics did not see ZETA as real advancement of BeOS, but rather as an unfinished and buggy operating system loaded with third party applications that were either obsolete, unsupported, or non-functional.

While yellowTAB did clean up the selection of bundled applications in following versions, ZETA remains somewhat unstable when compared to other modern desktop operating systems.

But perhaps the most criticized practice by yellowTAB was its tendency to make claims that turned out to be either half truths or vague enough that they could not be confirmed.

Be Inc intended this release to be a taster and to draw users into buying the Professional edition, which was fully installable to a physical hard drive partition.

Unfortunately, many users discovered that it was a trivial task to install the personal version to a real partition, and so Be Inc ultimately lost much of the sales potential for the product.

Version 1.0 of Zeta included a badly thought out activation component, which requires a code to be entered and authenticated via a remote server before the nag screen will stop and full functionality is restored.

]The main reason that there hasn't been a public statement previously is that dealing with this matter legally, in Germany, is an expensive undertaking and--given the apparently small amount of funding behind Zeta in its various incarnations--we'd only be in a position to spend significant money and legal time to make a point.[...

If Herr Korz [Bernd Korz, Former CEO of yellowTAB] feels that he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been using, we're completely unaware of it, and I'd be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim.A cease of distribution letter was posted by Magnussoft on 5 April 2007.