iPhone as gaming platform: Yes! Yes! Yes!
March 17, 2008 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Cell phone, Gaming, iPhone
With the iPhone SDK out, the talk of the developer community and technology maves is that the iPhone will become the next big gaming device. Although there are current limitations to the way applications cannot run in the background (meaning that the phone will always be a phone first, and everything else later), games will demand the full user attention.
What makes the iPhone big is that it was the gaming machine that Apple thought it never had – in the same way we’re saying Sony has made the cheapest Blu-ray player in the PS3 and Nokia being the biggest music player and camera manufacturer because of their cell phones. There’s a goldmine in the iPhone’s potential to be a gaming device: a huge touch screen that doesn’t break, small and pocketable and fairly decent battery life. There are no rooms for hardware clutter so developers can accentuate areas of the screen for specific functions rather than rely on hardware limitations – there is only ONE hardware button anyway.
[image credit to blogiphone.fr]
Can’t wait til the silly Iphone as the next big gaming platform nonsense goes away. Touch and Tilt are not versatile enough to control anything more complex than Super Monkey Ball and the screen does not have enough real estate to give up for a virtual control pad.
Just ask anyone who has played nes emulated games on the iPhone, the controls suck, take up too much screen, and offer no tactile feedback so you are constantly having to check and make sure your fingers are on the “button” dots.
The ds has a touchscreen you say? Yes but it also has a full control pad. Even the Wii has controls on the Wiimote.
Safari freezes the phone enough as it is, can you imagine how bad it’s going to get once apps & games are added? No wonder they’re limiting it to one app at a time.
Sorry but the iPhone is a jack of few trades and a master of none. It’s choice of allowedmedia types are severely limited and outclassed by every other media phone, the camera is completely gimped, and now somehow with the crippled one-app-at-a-time sdk it’s going to be some big phone/gaming platform goldmine? Funny stuff!