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Handheld Gaming - The future of smartphones?
Posted by anand lalshimpi in Gamer PC | Jun. 24, 2009 1:00 PM
Before the iPod and the cellphone merged, the two devices happily coexisted in our pockets and luggage. We used our iPods (or other portable media players) when we wanted entertainment and our cellphone when we wanted communication. Thanks to Moore’s Law, the components that went into both got small enough that companies could start building unified devices. Many cell phones started offering MP3 playback capabilities and of course there was the iPhone.
Being able to play music and videos doesn’t actually take a lot of work. The processing power required to decode both audio and video formats is easily included in some very low power System on a Chip designs. Thankfully, Moore’s Law doesn’t stop once a key feature has been introduced. The processors that power our smartphones will continue to get more powerful as will the graphics cores that accompany them.
I’ve always scoffed at the idea of serious gaming on the iPhone, but with the latest hardware update in the iPhone 3GS I’m beginning to think that there’s some potential here. The PowerVR SGX core in the 3GS is multiple times faster than the PowerVR MBX-Lite that drove 3D graphics in the iPhone 3G, and significantly faster than what’s in Nintendo’s DS handhelds. The horsepower is there, not to mention the flash storage (up to 32GB with the 3GS) so all that’s missing are developers.
I’ve played some fun games on the iPhone 3GS but we’re really missing big AAA titles on the platform. Give the app store some more time to mature and get even faster hardware into the hands of the populace and I believe there may be some merit in serious gaming on touch screen smartphones. I’m particularly excited about ngmoco’s untitled FPS for the iPhone.
Is that odd to say? What about you? Looking forward to any smartphone games or is it too early to get excited about that?
Processors will continue to get smaller until about 18nm where the cost becomes too expensive to manufacture. That's 5 years away. Then, they only affordable improvements are architecture advancements, and power tweaking. Processing power will be powerful enough without problem for at least the next 10 years.
Besides that, although smart phones weren't designed for gaming, people still find a need to, rather than wait to game on their PC or console. Game graphics and physics will only advance as fast as consumer level hardware will. As for gaming, games are almost never designed for phones like the Android or iPhone or BlackBerry. They’re usually designed for consoles, then ported into PC’s, then later on get ported into phones and other electronics which is why they usually don’t end up working that well. The smart phone gaming market will get better, but it won’t make any substantial improvements.
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I believe the combination is inevitable as well. The only thing I'm uncertain of is the timeframe. For instance, remember that one of the ways Apple tries to make their products simple is lack of interface. Now, even the major consoles are trying to simplify the way we interact with games and make them more intuitional, but that doesn't mean buttons disappear altogether.
So will smartphones increase in game-playability? Yes. Will it be a revolution or an evolution? Most likely the latter. Either they user will need to familiarize themself with the interface, or the interface will need to further cater to the user.
I use my MotoQ as a GBA/SNES/Sega Genisis and could do others. There are plenty of emulators in the open source community that can be adapted to the different platforms. If the MotoQ can emulate all of these then there should be no problem with the faster Pre and 3GS. Of course this isn't the 3d accelerated games that Anand was looking for, but hey you get a ton of titles and they are small, fun and familiar.
-Matt
I don't think it's an odd thing to say, I believe we have generally seen a history of unifying functions into one device, for example once upon a time we had pagers and phones... Over the last 10 years we've seen the mass exploitation of A/V on mobile devices and what the iphone does is a natural progression of this trend. I think AAA titles will come over time, because if you think about it.. the iPhone is only 3 years old and only now has it got really serious about the graphics hardware on the device. But as the concept of haptic devices and multi touch is really a very new concept in the world of mainstream, give it another 5 years and I think we shall see serious competition in the market for touch based and handheld console markets....
My 2 pennies!
Jon