Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

It seems it's heydays for mobile games, where technologies and features that were popular 10 years ago on PC's (2D platform games etc) are deployed successfully for the smaller format and capacity of mobile phones. An exception is not the least the Nokia N-Gage (even though it's not really a successful product compared to all Java and BREW phones on the market) that supports 3D graphics. 3D graphics has also been deployed in smart phones, via software rendering (ARM9 CPU's are powerful enough to handle that). Both nVidia and ATi have 3D chips for mobile phones. Implementing 3D hardware of course comes at a cost, but as the industry needs to continue pushing out new phone models to consumers, new features need to deployed, and after cameras maybe 3D gaming (and ditto hardware acceleration) is the next feature many will request.

A lot is said about N-Gage and smart phones in the news, but very few purchase such pricey and bulky products. The real market for mobile gaming is mainstream phones with Java (J2ME) and BREW. Also compared to a Game Boy those devices are very expensive, so if it's only mobile gaming that is needed, no doubt a Game Boy or similar is still a better choice.

Gameloft: http://www.gameloft.com/
Nokia N-Gage: http://www.n-gage.com/
nVidia: http://www.nvidia.com/page/handheld.html
ATi: http://www.ati.com/products/handheld.html