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Apple to launch gaming-focused iPhone?

Analyst suggest software differentiation is the way forward

Apple to launch gaming-focused iPhone?
Dedicated gaming mobile phones haven’t exactly set the world alight - think the original N-Gages or Gizmondo. But what if Apple were to launch a games-focused iPhone?

This isn’t (just) wishful thinking on our part. Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner has claimed that Apple may launch several different iPhones later this year, with software the differentiating factor rather than hardware.

The Register gives this example: “Apple could market one ‘YouTube’ iPhone model with applications that provide video capture, editing and sharing features”.

However, given the huge popularity of games on the App Store, if Apple did pursue this kind of software segmentation strategy, a gaming iPhone would surely be one of the options.

What would be the dedicated games features, though? Physical buttons would presumably count as a hardware change rather than software, and in any case there are hundreds of new APIs in the iPhone 3.0 software that can be used for gaming.

Short of launching some kind of ‘Comes With Games’ iPhone where you get unlimited games downloads, we can’t come up with much extra. Still, perhaps Apple can.

Or perhaps it’s another analyst making predictions that turn out to be hot air, of course. Perish the thought.

Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)