Toshiba's new TG01 smartphone is a fine piece of kit - slim and sleek, with the Windows Mobile OS and a 1GHz SnapDragon processing platform inside.

It could be a big deal for mobile gaming, judging by the demo we saw today at Mobile World Congress on the Qualcomm stand (they're responsible for SnapDragon).

Watch this video:



The game is called Electopia, and is the work of Swedish developer Southend. There's a bit of YouTube compression at work in this video - on the handset itself, the game looks crisp and beautiful.

It makes use of hardware-accelerated 3D OpenGL-ES 2.0 graphics, programmable shading with unified shader technology, as well as decent physics and AI.

(It's also a bit hard to play well when you're filming it with a camera held in your other hand).

It's clear that the TG01 packs a serious gaming punch. In the past, this would be useless in the real world, given the difficulty of consumers actually buying such a game - witness all the cool 3D games demoed on the stands of the likes of ARM and Nvidia at previous trade shows.

However, this handset's WinMo OS should mean that developers like Southend can make these games available through the newly-announced Microsoft application store, providing a direct route to market.

We're hoping to catch up with Southend at Mobile World Congress tomorrow to find out a bit more, as well as get Qualcomm's views on SnapDragon's gaming potential.