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This is my first time writing anything so it may seem a bit long winded but please keep this in mind. A lot of people are so busy guess who’s going to win the handheld platform wars Sony, or Nintendo. What a lot of people may or may not realize is that your cell phone is yet another platform that’s in the handheld wars. It has no name it has no branding and it doesn’t matter where the games come from. In the end you will see your cell phone replacing a lot of these other devices.
You may be thing how is the cell phone going to replace my PSP, or GB DS. Well let’s go with a quick run down of what your PSP or GB DS can and can not do. First and foremost they both play video games, you can surf the web listen to music and you can also watch movies. Now lets see cell phones can do play video games, surf the web, listen to music along with stream new music and also watch movies oh wait there is more they can now watch TV, make calls send text and picture messages. Now I know what you’re saying the video games on a cell phone are nothing like the PSP or GB DS of today and with that I would have to agree. If you look at the first GBC and the cell phones of today I would have to say they are darn close.
Video games on cell phones are going to be a big business in the next few years. With they size of flash memory and the GPU’s that NVidia and ATI have out now and are working on for future handset will surpass what your GB DS, and PSP’s have to offer. Currently some of the handsets that’s Verizon Wireless sell already have ATI chips.
Some of trouble areas that the cell phone is still lacking in would be sound quality for games and screen size and they have no type of game pad. These are both simple to fix if someone like creative came out with a type of X-fi chipset for cell phones for example. Most can a test that their hands start to hurt after a short time of playing a game on a cell phone but if someone like Microsoft or Sony game out with a game pad for the cell phone that could be use via Bluetooth that would solve this problem or some other type of wireless format. Once area cell phones do not hold a candle to handhelds is screen quality or size. This has been improving with each new handset out on the market and currently cell phone makers are working on better screen technologies that would improve the size of the screen and its picture quality along with not draining the batter too quickly. One such technology is OLED’s would help improve screen quality and battery life all in one shoot.
Cell phone makes are just starting to introduce handset with large HD already install. Yes these handsets would cost more then the normal handset but they also have 8GB hard drives Samsung, Nokia are just are few that offer this option. Now the cell phone has one up on the handhelds none of the current handhelds offer internal hard drives yes you can use a memory stick in the PSP. You do have WiFi on the handhelds but you have some type of broadband access on your cell phone but it WiFi, EVDO, UMTS with this option you can download newer games or music. This would be a break even between the two.
You will now say what about customer base Sony, Nintendo both sell millions of handhelds a year. Well let’s see if they each sold to day 10 million handheld that would be about 20 million last year alone well Verizon Wireless has 59.8 million customers, and Sprint has 30 odd million and so does Alltel and so on and so forth. So if each service provider upgraded 10% of their customer base they would have a total of about 13 million new handset that support some type of gaming or music feature and we all this is not even close to the percent of people that upgrade handsets every year. I for one buy a new phone every few months just because of all the new features and service that a coming out. In the end you will start to see Nintendo cell phone and Sony PSP phones.