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iPhone at 10 - 6 ways Apple's phone has pushed mobile gaming

From the App Store to the Retina Display

iPhone at 10 - 6 ways Apple's phone has pushed mobile gaming
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The first generation iPhone has just celebrated its tenth birthday. That's not just an excuse for Apple to have a knees-up - it's a major milestone for the entire smartphone industry.

Of course, it would be wrong to say that without the iPhone there would be no smartphone industry. There were already mobile phones that could carry out all of the same basic functions before 2007.

But that smartphone industry would look very different, and quite possibly a lot less appealing to mobile gamers, without Apple's historic blower.

There have been 15 distinct models of the iPhone to date, but we're not going to run through them all here. Instead, we want to pick out those models and the specific features that have made the biggest impact on mobile gaming.

iPhone (2007) - Touchscreen

We have to start with the very first iPhone, which was released on June 29, 2007. This was the bold device that put forward the very form factor we all carry around in our pockets today, centred around a large capacitive touchscreen.

That touchscreen had a profound effect on gaming. There had been touchscreen gaming devices already by this point, most notably the Nintendo DS, but none as sensitive or responsive to your direct (multi)touch as the iPhone.

iPhone 3G (2008) - App Store

The second iPhone was an iterative update on the original in many ways, but its most notable addition meant that this was where the iPhone story truly started.

It was the concurrent arrival of iPhone OS 2.0 (now known as iOS) with the brand new App Store that kickstarted the massive mobile games industry that we know today. Having a standard curated shop front and regulated development environment to provide applications lead to a massive increase in quality from the shonky Java games we had been playing up to that point.

iPhone 3GS (2009) - S for 'Speed'

The third iPhone was the first 'S' model - and the S stood for 'Speed'. The iPhone 3GS represented a massive step up in performance from the early models, with the line's first ever system-on-a-chip consisting of a 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and a meaty PowerVR SGX535 GPU, with double the amount (256MB) of RAM.

This provided way more gaming performance than we had been accustomed to up to that point. All of a sudden, Apple had a bona fide portable gaming device on its hands

iPhone 4 (2010) - Retina Display

The iPhone 4 was a landmark piece of design. Its angular, industrial good looks proved hugely influential, and elements of it can still be seen in new phones today.

But that's not the reason the iPhone 4 makes this list. The phone's Retina Display would push mainstream mobile display sharpness to a new default level, with Apple's intention to make individual pixels invisible to the human eye becoming the new normal.

iPhone 5S (2013) - 64-bit CPU

We skipped the iPhone 5 because it's major relevant hardware feature - a longer 16:9 display - had been pretty normal for some time on the Android scene. Apple's implementation really didn't shake up the mobile gaming industry in any meaningful way.

Its successor the iPhone 5S was arguably a much bigger deal, with the addition of the Apple A7 chip. This was the first 64-bit chip to ship in a consumer smartphone, representing another huge step up in performance. It also started the countdown on legacy apps and games that would remain stuck in their 32-bit ways.

iPhone 6 Plus (2014) - Flagship size options

We haven't picked the iPhone 6 for its move to a larger screen size. The by this point thriving Android platform had seen a general shift to 5-inch and above displays years earlier. As with the iPhone 5S, Apple was merely playing catch-up.

No, we've picked the iPhone 6 because it established the option of super-sizing your flagship phone at launch. With the addition of the 'Plus' model, you could opt to stay light and compact, or you could go for an improved gaming and media experience - and neither choice would be clearly the worse.

Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.