Is the future mobile?

#1 Very good topic Berserk. I'm glad I saw this before I made dinner. I still have to make dinner, but I'm looking forward to replying to this as soon as I can. I really want to see as many people as possible jump in this thread.

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#3 The answer is pretty simple - Mobile phones won't ever replace the desktop machine (I'll use desktop rather than PC to include Mac too), they haven't the power, storage space or flexibility to compete.

Mobile phones are constrained by size and with the laws of physics you'll never cram as much into a phone as you can a pc or laptop size casing -- in 10yrs time a mobile may have the same power as a pc today but then pcs in 10yrs will be 100times faster.

So the answer to whether the pc will die is an easy one. No they won't.

Is the PC dying as a gaming/entertainment platform though? --- possibly! But that's more to do with game consoles than mobiles, and whilst consoles have conquered dominance in most genres it still hasn't an answer to keyboard/mouse combo really needed for a good RPG.

Could something like kinect help with that?

#4 My opinion is slightly different from Andy's in that while a mobile machine can't replace a desktop (for the same money, you will always get more performance and storage), mobile is catching up to being a viable contender pretty fast and in a way that makes the question a little moot.

CES debuted the first dual core smart phone with a laptop dock (that is, the smartphone doubles as a laptop replacement- you just have to put it in that funky docking station so you can use the laptop form-factor keyboard and monitor), and it's only going to get better from there with nVidia jumping into the CPU market.

But I don't think PCs will die. What I think will happen is a blurring of the spaces- sort of how the dividing line between laptops and desktops in their spectrum of use has blurred. So just like you see the "desktop replacement" laptop (which is really just a complicated way of saying "fast laptop"), you'll start seeing "laptop replacement"- or even "desktop replacement" smartphones (though you probably won't really see the latter in a serious sense until the quad-core smartphones start coming out in like 2 years- maybe a tad bit sooner).

Smartphone OS's also need a lot of growing up to do, and I suspect that within 2 years, WP7 will probably be able to give way to simply being W7 (W8?), and Android will be very much grown up by then- especially since Google is already working on their big-boy version of it to compete with Windows and Mac (and Apple better watch their back then! Having failed to get the market penetration into the business sector that they probably would have liked by now makes them a ripe target for all those companies who don't want Windows, but are iffy on Apple's ability to replace it- Google is aiming at business in a lot of right ways, and that will translate into people on the fence bringing Android home with them).

That's my opinion on the next few years. I'd like to hear more opinions on this as well though :)

#5 I recently attended Intel's Elements conference, and this is exactly the kind of topic that was discussed. The future seems to be going towards a consolidation of platform. Right now we are experiencing a fragmentation in the mobile space (iPhone,iPad,Android,kindel,blackberry,nokia...) But the hardware manufacturers (Intel,ASUS,Acer,Nokia...) are working together on cross-platform solutions (MeeGo and Flash, are good examples of this).

The future that was described to us at Elements can be summarized as follows: "The apps that run on your mobile/tablet will synch to your smart TV." You can already see glimpses of this on TV, check out the "going to the cloud" commercials from Microsoft.

Do I think Desktops are going to disappear? No they will still be around but more as workstations. For most people tablets/netbooks/mobiles/SmartTV will be enough.

#6 Not replace, but mobile is the new thing everybody has and will always have. It's very much here to stay, and it's where the money is.

... well, everybody has except me ...

#7 @M. Perry:

Quote:Very good topic Berserk. I'm glad I saw this before I made dinner. I still have to make dinner, but I'm looking forward to replying to this as soon as I can. I really want to see as many people as possible jump in this thread.

Do you know a lot more, than you are allowed to say? After your post, i had the impression, that Torque will ONLY target the mobile market in the future.

#8 @Thomas - I think you are reading into it too deeply. The topic is of high interest to me after last year's Casual Connect. So many developers I talked to were mobile producers or programmers. They are all constrained to the limitations of mobile devices. What made me take a special interest in this is due to how much iPhone work I've done in the past year. Five years ago if you asked me I could run a nice looking 3D games with shaders, at decent performance, on one of my mobile phones I would have laughed. When I graduated, I avoided any mobile job offers like the plague. I wanted to work on high end 2D and 3D games, which meant PC and console. Now, the tides are turning. I don't have time to get into my original thoughts, but hopefully that should satisfy your curiosity.

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#10 Given the idiotic nature of most people to drive while texting/browsing with their silly phones I hope the hell not!

But to replace the pc? No. A great many dumb games and pointless apps that do nothing do not a computer make. A very successful and appealing toy, sure.

#11 I reckon mobiles will be a big contender in the casual games market, of course - but there will always be a hardcore of PC game players. You'll never fit ArmA on a phone, for example (or even on a console, maybe). That's the split I can see.

Also, control is an issue. At the point where you're plugging your phone into a keyboard/monitor/mouse, you might as well be sitting at a desktop anyway, and that takes away the only reason you have a mobile: mobility. But without that keyboard/mouse combo, controlling certain types of games will be difficult. Touch and tilt controls only go so far - I can't wait to see what other control innovations we come up with in the next few years. (Well... maybe we'll have to get over touch controls first :P.)

#12 One question to the community: Does Torque has, at this time, any chance to survive on the mobile market? Unity, UDK and Shiva are hard competitors.

My wish: Torque should raise from the ground up. Four engines (2D and 3D, Win and Mac) should be enough.

#13 Too many devs and gamers who create mobile games don't get the mobile space. Even Infinity Blade is a casual 2 minute gameplay game. It's not a long drawn out opus, its quick hits that someone can play waiting for the bus, taking a smoke, coffee breaks.

I really do think that mobile is extremely important and is possibly the last place a small unknown studio can make money. How many million angry birds were sold, how many million fruit ninja's? Halfbrick made like 3 or 4 games on XBLIG and made basically nothing, did a few psp minis and bam hit it big on the iPhone.

We need a good fast possibly from the ground up mobile solution as well as a decent web solution for sites like Kongregate and Facebook. I don't know if you guys saw this: www.kongregate.com/unity_game_contest

#14 To reiterate what some have already said here and throw my own two cents into the pile, I do not believe that mobile devices will replace desktops as far as gaming is concerned. I do see that mobile devices redirect an aspect of the gaming market from targeting teenagers to targeting a much more wide range of gamers.

Let me give an example, in my line of work I frequently have to visit surgeries. Now, I would have been relatively surprised to see some anesthesiologist in his 40's sitting at the head of a patient's bed with a Game Boy in hand during the 90's, but I often see them playing on an iPhone. Thus, I say that mobile based games are entering a new phase of their maturation, but that phase is mostly limited to casual games.

As already said, mobile devices lack the CPU and memory needed to run a 3D world, but they are getting better. The question then becomes “Will mobile devices surpass desktop devices in performance in the future?” because as processors and various other bells-and-whistles improve the demand for photo-realism comes out more. As of about a year ago I have been aware, as many of you likely are as well, of a project that is working on live voxel based rendering for which the hardware needed to crunch through involves a daisy-chain of very expensive GPUs. So, in short, no, mobile devices will not, in the foreseeable future, be able to meed the demands of non-casual games.

That being said, I do believe that mobile devices do have a place in high-end games as a way to augment the play experience. This, of course, does not pertain to the traditional game design model as it requires a reworking of the idea behind player/gamer interaction (with the exception of profile porting). When game architecture begins to interact with the player, then the possibility of linking a serious game running on a desktop device to a mobile device as a means of remote interaction (not simply talking about as a game controller) becomes rather appealing.

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#16 @Ted - actually I agree with you and had written much the same as you've written before I re-read the post and thought what he is talking about is gaming rather than business connotations.

For the business world I think absolutely that mobiles will replace the desktop in the majority of cases, they're smaller, lighter, use less power and offer so much more flexibility. I attended SAPs TechEd earlier this year to hear much about their acquisition of Sybase as a market leader in that area.

Not quite as interesting as the work with a new mobile technology that will allow people to buy beer at a bar from their mobile phone, currently being trialled in some pubs in the uk -- no need to wait in line and queue up, you can even order your drinks whilst you're on the way to the pub so they are ready and waiting for when you get there... now there is a good idea ;)

@Beserk - As great as mobile adoption will be and as much as it will take users away from PC's it won't replace the power user where high-end gaming falls as they simply don't have the space in device the size of a phone to offer the same raw computing power.

Yes in 10-15years you may be able to run Crysis on a mobile but by then crysis won't be considered a high-end game it'd be like running Pong on Dual core machine today.

What you've described is a PS3 controller not a Wii -- yes parts of the wii control use a d-pad, buttons and an accelerometer but you're missing the crucial optical sensor to allow it to detect where it's pointing.

Overall I'm not quite sure what point you're making anyway - the Wii is pitched more at the casual gaming market much like the mobile and much like the mobile has opened up a huge new market of new gamers that never would have played games before.

Neither are replacements for hardcore gamers that want the power that only a desktop can offer, what they do is supplement that market with a whole new breed of gamers and gaming and make gaming much more acceptable, available and important part of all of our lives!!

#17

Quote:For the business world I think absolutely that mobiles will replace the desktop in the majority of cases, they're smaller, lighter, use less power and offer so much more flexibility.

Yep, and there is already that movement back towards Virtual Desktops (dump terminals with better UI, lol), and companies are looking at saving on real estate costs by having virtual offices and a mobile workforce that works from home. It's all much less sexy than games development, but we get to enjoy the fruits of that labor just as much :)

I don't think I should be able to order beer from my phone- that would be very bad for me, lol...

What I like about desktops is that people who want to have them will basically have super-computing power at their fingertips by the time mobile gets to the point where you can dock your phone at your desk and get "normal" usage out of it. That means that hardcore gamers will be playing games with serious Interactive Fidelity (think brain wave control, 3D, uncanny valley, AI that makes IBM's stuff look like run of the mill, etc).

Or maybe they'll just use it for SETI@Home ;)

#18 I think mobile gaming will free up the desktop more and more in the future for real gaming, the past decade has shown massive growth (in the UK at least) of 30-50 female demographic most of them playing small casual games. and not to mention the massive increase in PC usage to play casual games over the net on employers time.

one large problem as I see it is simply the screen real estate available, already the iphone is almost too big, increased resolution only gets you so far and less than 5 years will see the maximum *usable* resolution on a 5x3 inch screen.

If you extend 'mobile' to include 7-15 inch tablets in their various guises, then you may be onto something, but even then, in real terms i think you are only saving desk real estate space.

I honestly think that once the fad stage of these devices end and the real uses are found as well as the negative impact on workflows in many scenarios are discovered the ubiquitous nature of these will drop somewhat.

on a side but similar note... anybody else old enough to remember how 'filofaxes' were going to organise the world after 5 years of fad only the minority who actually had real use for them kept them, i see the moble future in a somewhat similar light.

so to answer the original question, will mobile phones replace the PC, no. But feel free to insult me and call me closed minded because i believe so :D

#19 A big market, oh yes. Replacement, oh no. One only has to look to hits like MineCraft to see that the garage developer can still release a PC game and have it be a huge hit.

Smart-Phone games are sort of a novelty right now, and any developer who wants to make bank, had better do so quickly before they get drowned out by the noise. Something about this platform is catching like wild fire, and the "big boys" are gaining their footing very fast, and are already playing king of the hill. See: www.148apps.com/148-top-paid-games/

That said, the devices that can play these games are too expensive. Over the average two year contract, one pays well over $1,000 for what amounts to a calling device with a gameboy attached. Most consumers balk, but as price comes down, the market will grow. There again, those who are more price conscious tend to spend less in the app stores anyway. It will be interesting to see the peak-oil charts once this all pans out.

I'm of the balk-at-the-price camp, and will stick to the tried and true methods of mobile gaming: Nintendo. Very much looking forward to the 3DS. :)

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