UK smartphone game developer Astraware snapped up

When a big company buys a little company, it usually means the little company has the sort of expertise worth paying for. So, when it comes to the acquisition of Staffordshire, UK-based PDA and smartphone game developer Astraware by US PDA and smartphone productivity and entertainment publisher Handmark, conventional wisdom states the deal was all about Handmark gaining what it's calling a "world's leading smartphone gaming studio".

While not disputing that title, it's clear to us this was just a bonus in the quest to buy the world's most impressively-bearded mobile gaming CEO: we talk, of course, of Astraware's Howard Tomlinson. The terms of the deal weren't announced but we'd reckon that beard was more than worth its weight in gold.

Initially focusing on the development of games for Palm devices, Astraware gradually branched out in the early-1990s porting titles such as Bejeweled for Pocket PC and more recently helping PopCap during the development of the iPod Bejeweled and Zuma ports. It now becomes Handmark's in-house UK development team.

Handmark, which already publishes smartphone versions of games such as Tetris and Scrabble, now expects to further develop the gaming market across platforms such as Pocket PC, Blackberry, Palm, as well as Windows, Symbian, and Linux-based smartphones. We wouldn't be surprised to see activity on the iPhone either.