iPhone: The decline of the protable games market?

[bdbdbd]

@Plaupius: I don't know if it's possible to shift your puchases to your new device in Apples service, but that would partially solve the problem.

There are different market segments in the mobile phones market when looking at why people change their phones. One indeed is the people running after the latest features, one is the people running after the latest design, one segment changes their phones when the old one is becoming dead, and of course combinations of them.
If we look at iPhone in the context of iPod, we are talking about iPod talk. It's pretty natural for iPod users to upgrade their devices for the next incarnation of iPod (which was a great strategy in business sense), which indeed would make sense that segment of customers to stay on board with iPhone. Also, iPhone do offer something objectively better than most phones in the market, which is bigger screen. My coworker bought Nokia 5800 a while ago, and i got to test his phone and the big screen was pretty great in use (especially watching porn from internet).

The thing is, that iPhones competitors offer the same services (Nokia has Ovi as a door to their music store, maps, N-Gage, etc. Sony-Ericsson are working on one their own) and downloading stuff to your phone isn't a new thing, since the aftermarket that delivers content have existed for more than a decade already.

I do believe the iPhone as a dev platform will be profitable for a lot of developers (as the mobile phones as platform have been), but i doubt it will be the medium for handheld games in the future. It would be like saying PC will be the medium for games in the future.