You don't need us to tell you Bejeweled is a gaming phenomenon; one sold every 10 seconds, 350 million web downloads, 25 million copies sold in total etc.

You might be interested to know, however, that Bejeweled isn't just a PC gaming phenomenon though. The various mobile versions have been massively successful too. It's been the number 2 best-selling mobile game in North America for the past year - thanks in part to PopCap's beefy publishing deal with EA Mobile. Indeed, in terms of lifetime impact, PopCap claims "75 million mobile units deployed" - i.e. downloads, freebies and embedded versions.

Where does that leave Bejeweled Twist: the latest (third) version of the franchise that went live this week on PopCap's site and will be rolled out across casual gaming websites mid November?

Quick recap. It's called Twist, because you now move around the play area, controlling a circle of four jewels, which you rotate to fulfil the standard match-three mechanics of the series. The most significant point - at least for mobile however - is that despite the ubiquity of the two-button PC mouse, there's no rotational directionality involved in the game. It remains a pure one-button clockwise experience without a counter-clockwise twisting option.

Talking to the game's lead designer (and PopCap co-founder) Jason Kapalka, he said that during the game's four year development cycle, dual rotationality was one of the many options tried. "Why can't I rotate different ways? That the first question everyone asks," he explained, rather wearily, as indeed it was our first question.

Surprisingly though, he said adding the feature didn't work. It actually made the game too easy. How the design would have had to be changed for mobile devices if it had worked was a question only answered with a shrug of the shoulders. Just lucky, we guess.

So, next issue: when to expect the mobile versions of Bejeweled Twist? Well, they're currently in development at PopCap's Dublin office and early builds are already floating around the industry. We'd assume the game will probably fall under the company's deal with EA Mobile for Bejeweled and Bejeweled 2, which was recently extended to 2010, so that's the publishing deal sorted.

Perhaps more interesting in terms of speculation will be which mobile platform(s) it launches on. Will PopCap's attendance at the Nokia Games Summit in Rome mean we'll see a N-Gage port? How about one ahead of the mobile and iPhone shoe-ins?

Now that would be a twist.