You’re walking down the high street, checking out the latest gadgets in the phone shop when you see a cool new phone with a 3D game running on it. This looks like cool technology, so like the geek that you are (however much you try to hide it) you wander in to check it out. Within seconds an assistant has sidled over and starts to try and sell you a ‘3G’ phone.
Your initial reaction is that they have got their acronyms mixed up, “it’s the '3D' game I’m interested in, not ‘3G,’” you repeat, but to no avail. This curious approach is how all the operators are selling the latest 3D mobile phones. Now a cynical view would be that marketing has got involved where is shouldn’t have. You know the scenario.
Tech Guy: 'This is the latest blah blah 3569i with JSR 184 3D'
Marketing Guy: 'You said 3D, you mean 3G'
Tech Guy: 'No 3D, nothing to do with 3G'
Marketing Guy: 'No wait a second, they both start with 3, I'm getting something'
Tech Guy: 'No really this..'
Marketing Guy: '3D/3G that is just brilliant, we can sell that'
There is no connection between 3G, which is a network technology and 3D, which is a handset technology. But then again, there is. Think back to Doom. What Doom did was bring together two of the most important technologies in gaming into a single package that was accessible to everyone. Doom was the 1st best-seller 3D game, and it was the first game to push multiplayer network gaming. The reason is simple - it was at this point that the technology had matured to the point where you could run fairly complicated network technology and a full 3D engine fast enough to make the experience fun.
The latest 3G phones will have three things that make this type of gaming interesting. To be able to handle the extra complexity of both the network technology and the added features that customers expect on a 3G smart phone they need to be running at least an ARM 9 and we are starting to see either Dual ARM 9 or ARM 11 devices. They will have lots of memory to hold all that video and a big enough screen to do a video call. All of this makes them possible to run 3D games, and the latest 3D hardware is providing both video compression as well 3D acceleration, which will accelerate this even more.
3G also allows larger games to be delivered to mobile phones. The original size of downloadable games was 64K, which has increased to 180K with 2.5G. With 3G this limit will increase to around 3 meg, and will therefore be capable of delivering the type of high level, hard core gaming that mobile phones simply haven’t provided until this point. You will see 3D games driven by hardware acceleration, multiplayer running over fast 3G networks and much larger applications. Whilst this experience will go over the heads of the vitally important mass market, hard-core gamers will salivate over the richness of experience now achievable on mobile.
3G and the Hard Core Gamer