Google is going to kill apple at their own game. My 2 cents.

@Ail

Smartphones will kill handleds... eventually. This mantra has been repeated for ten years already since GBA era. Just like famousringo said - PC to consoles is exactly what mobile phones to handhelds - survival of handhelds is dependant on differentiation from smartphones. Nobody in this biz is able to do it better than Nintendo at the moment, if they will fail - handhelds will fail. On side note, pocket issue is irrelevant, very few people carry handhelds with them constantly, still software sales indicate that people do play on their handhelds.

Smartphones with apps is a recent phenomenon. Prior to the iPhone, there wasn't much of a market for games. The growth in the past 2 years has been incredible.

Most of the market growth in portable gaming will probably occur in the smartphones, whereas the dedicated units growth will slow or perhaps even shrink. They might not kill the market for dedicated units, but a stagnant/declining market is not something to look forward to.

Nintendo does have an ace up its sleeve with smartphones. They can always port their library to other systems. At any time they could release the GBA library and sell a ton of games. Nintendo also have the best handheld game designers in the world, so they could release new games on other systems if it was in their best interest.

Not really, read my post above about how media predicted doom and gloom for handhelds prior to GBA launch, and how DS, quoting myself, "was partially an answer to those claims and threats from below as wel as threat from above - PSP".

Smartphone boom began in 2001, admittedly a lot of apps were completely free and there were no distribution models for selling apps with meaningful revenue at the time. Even today when mobile phone gaming, a mere portion of content that sells to mobile phone users, nearly outpaced handheld gaming in revenue, it's accounted for ~$5 billion worldwide (too much for "no games prior to iPhone", eh?), but still remains highly segmented market. Recent Apple success is the only platform with some meaningful marketshare, if we choose to believe last report it's about ~10% of total game sales on mobile phones. It might go up but it has natural barrier of growth - most lucrative market with highest potential of growth in mobile gaming is Asia, Apple devices sell badly in that region. Not saying though that problem can't be fixed in the future.

Of course mobile gaming is to grow more rapidly than handheld gaming, as I've said already - it nearly outpaced handhelds in revenue. But the situation is no differenet than in PC vs console biz. PC business is almost equal to all consoles combined, according to last reports it's going to grow at faster pace as well. Console gaming still mainstream, but it's growth potential is nowhere near to other segments. Overall, as you may see, situation is absolutely similar to non-portable gaming - non-dedicated gaming machine, aka PC, vs dedicated gaming machines, aka home consoles. Both markets somehow able to co-exist for the time being, at some point PC gaming even was proclaimed "dead", when in truth it shifted to low-end compared to home consoles.

Bottomline - if we're going to predict that smartphones are about to kill handheld gaming , then we should be consistent and predict that home consoles will be butchered by PC gaming as well - very similar situations.

LOL, not a chance, andriod is crap and their phones are selling crap compared to the iphone.

Yes, while the others are fighting each other and beware of Apple, Google could do a surprise attack.

Android is much more scaleable than the iphone platform. But how about we make a friendly bet - in two years, after Iphone goes to Verizon(probably in about 6 months) lets see where android is compared to iphone. I have both an iphone(3GS) and an android phone(nexus one) as well as a BB (bold 9700). ask me which one dies on me more, also ask me which one I carry around more.

I don't hide my occupation, but still I'm not an Apple fanboy as you might suspect. I'm too adult to be a fanboy of anything anymore. Besides, my occupation bears no relevance to the facts of the situation.

1) Apple created the iPhone and iPod Touch and started selling them to the customers.

2) Apple opened App Store and made the iPhone SDK public.

3) Indie devs started making games for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and people started buying them and playing.

4) The App Store market grew at a staggering pace, and bigger and bigger developers and publisher got interested.

That's a rough timeline of what has happened. My point is that Apple didn't choose to make a gaming device, they designed and made a multipurpose "appliance." We, the developers and customers, have turned it into a potent gaming platform. IMO that is the key, and that is also why the platform will continue to grow and succeed.

Don't need to do any bets as the market is clear and already set, the iphone is in the lead and will stay in the lead, the ne wiphone will then carry on where the 3GS left off, androis market is 12%, iphone is 64% (December 2009), app store has 200,000 apps, android store has 32,000, says it all really,

And I had a nexus one, I hated it, returned it so no harm done!

Umm your numbers are way off, as of Feb 2010 RIM has 42.1%, Apple 25.4%, MS 15.1% and Google 9.0%, Apple's share has actually begun to fall off as well, while Google has been growing fast