Usually sensible buisness journal Forbes is either being incredibly far sighted, or it has been knocking back pint after pint of Apple’s lysergic Kool-Aid.
In article published this week, the magazine claims that the time is right for Apple to push the iPhone as a mobile games platform that could grind the Nintendo DS into dust.
This would be the Nintendo DS that is currently the market leader, with a vast library of top quality games.
The key, says the article is the fact the iPhone combines both of the hot new gaming interfaces (the DS’ touchscreenand the Wii’s motion sensor) in one pocket sized device.
Frankly, this seems like wishful thinking on the part of someone who has never actually played a video game. While the touch screen is a top choice for certain genres (point-and-click adventures spring most readily to mind) there is a reason that even the motion-sensing Wii also comes with a D-Pad.
Nokia’ chief designer has dropped some hints about the kind of user interfaces the company are investigating.
You might assume that Alastair Curtis would be gleaning ideas from iPhone, Android, the OLPC wiior any number of communications or computing devices but no, he was spending a lot of his time playing with his Nintendo Wii and checking out the emotional feedback from his nunchucks.
“I bought the Wii almost the day it came out. The emotional feedback is three or four times more emotionally engaging than PS3 or Xbox 360,” says Curtis, “We’re starting to do that in the 6600 Fold. We have to do that more and more.”
Curtis uses the example of turning a phone upside down to put it into silent mode as an example of ‘meaningful insight’ into the kind of emotional feedback people can get from their handsets.
Interestingly, much of what he is talking about is already being implemented by the homebrew programming community. FlipSilent does exactly what he describes and there is even a project out there that lets your control your N95 using an actual Wii remote.
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