Are We Really Caught In An Either/Or Situation Between Smartphones And Gaming Handhelds?

" It's an endorsement we're not sure we agree with. Clearly there are lots of people happy enough with their smartphone gaming applications, but they also belong to the same demographic that device's like the NGP don't. Does it really matter if Cut The Rope shifts six million copies at £0.59, when Uncharted NGP has the potential to sell a million at £39.99? There's room in the market for both types of device in our opinion. id Software's John Carmack disagrees. Sort of.

"You don't always get to build pyramids just because you want to," the industry legend bizarrely stated, referencing the smartphone's ability to do many of the same things as dedicated handhelds, minus the control inputs. "The smart phone may turn out to be 80 percent as good at gaming as a dedicated gaming platform.

"People are going to carry their smart phone, and if it's an 80 percent gaming device, how many people in the gaming market will be satisfied with that? That's the question that's in everybody's mind, and I really don't know.

"If that's what the consumers are going to trend towards on there, there may not be much as developers we can do about that."

While Carmack's obviously right, we can't help but fear where this media-driven initiative is taking us. We understand that there will always be space for throw-away handheld endeavours, but we'd like to hope that traditional portable gaming won't be eaten away by a fleeting trend. If the future of handheld gaming really does peak with Angry Birds, consider us out of the space entirely.

We'll be crossing everything for the success of the NGP and the Nintendo 3DS.