Sony Ericsson has unveiled its new T310 mobile phone, which will come with Activision’s Gamehit Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 preloaded and additional games can be downloaded. The phone features a mini-joystick, color display, 32 polyphonic sounds and vibrating force feedback. Some pictures can be found at Three G Mobile.
No word on whether wireless multiplayer
is or will be supported. Now that would
be a cool feature.
I believe that online multiplayer gaming will be the most important selling-point for future Gaming-enabled cellphones over other handlheld gaming devices, including the GBA.
In Japan people have been playing simple games like chess and popular racing games online with their cellphones since 1999. It has been an important driving force for the adoption of internet enabled color screen mobile phones in Japan.
Ive used a similar model of phone before… The joystick is clunky and nearly unusable.
Ive used a similar model of phone before… The joystick is clunky and nearly unusable.
Great point there – in fact I found the same problem with the Atari 2600 which is why I refuse to buy a Playstation 2.
I believe that online multiplayer gaming will be the most
important selling-point for future Gaming-enabled cellphones
over other handlheld gaming devices, including the GBA.
<p>
Yes. But I’d like to play in a kind of WLAN. No extra costs and the lag would be low enough for arcade-style multiplayer games.
These things don’t change, the one on the left is damn the near the exact model/casing/design/whatever my sister has. The joystick is a peice of crap.
How are you planning to play games with a joystick that doesnt work well? Its an excersize in masochism to use that joystick. It might just be my big fingers or whatnot, but its still bad thumbstick.
These things don’t change
Good to know you’ve actually tried the joystick on the T310.
When they engineer CHEAP (enough for mass production) high quality joysticks this size flame me, till then just stop. Its a legitimate issue with such a product.
Maybe Nokia’s N-Gage device would be more interesting for you guys, as this device will include BlueTooth multi-player gaming and ordinary GBA/gamepad style directional buttons.
http://www.n-gage.com/n-gage/home.html
isn’t this suppose to be in NewMobileComputing? i don’t see this story there….
Maybe Nokia’s N-Gage device would be more interesting for you guys, as this device will include BlueTooth multi-player gaming and ordinary GBA/gamepad style directional buttons.
Pretty nice. There even seems to be a free SymbianOS SDK (C++) available. JavaME support is also there. This would be a pretty cool toy if I can find some spare time this summer
.
20 years ago I used to play Donkey Kong on something the same size and much cheaper.
How about actually making useful consumer electronics rather than stupid, expensive, brain dead techno-shit.
Technology for its own sake is stupid. Pencils work perfectly in space and a Rolodex never crashes.
A far more useful feature in a mobile phone is inbuilt voice recording.
Just give me a zaurus with a larger capacity battery and builtin bluetooth, 802.11b, and GSM, and a newer kernel, and I’d be happy
Maybe they could throw GPS in the mix too
And how about adding a digital camera? Add a phaser too!! .. wait, now I’m getting carried away 
I would prefer an everything in one device! Instead of carrying a organizer, cellphone, gaming handheld, photocamera, etc with me all the time. As long as it won’t become much bigger than a cellphone. Normal PDAs are just too big for me.
why call that a gaming phone. It looks like every other phone. The T68 also had a joystick and games and no one called that a gaming phone.
The so-called “gaming” industry over wireless is destined to fail, at least from the operator perspective. The interface sucks and the screens are generally a lot smaller than even a gameboy. But here is the kicker, wireless gaming is expensive and it won’t be long before users down load those games from the web to their pc for free or for $10 for unlimited usage and then upload them to their phones. Plus what happens when you have removable storage on your phone.
Those gaming plans suck. You pay the operators way too much for much too little and that just won’t last. It makes no sense. It is too easy to develop games for phones and the operators’ closed model is unsustainable.
Has anyone noticed the *size* of these things?
Why would anyone want to buy a phone to play games that is almost to size of a gameboy. You’d be better off getting a GBA, a *recognized* platform where you will at least get quality games. And a nice full-featured cellphone that can actually be used for TALKING. Those together will probably be cheaper than these new phones.
I agree with the poster saying that this is just un-necessary techno-crap.
Turnaround time to produce a cell game is typically a few months initially. The games themselves only have a short few-week lifespan with the operator however (they have to keep the ‘lowest common denominator’ ADD cellphone gameplayers constantly happy). Either that or they have an extremely long lifespan and the operator has no interest in ever changing their offering. Either way there is a turnaround time which is too fast or too slow. Combine this with low margins and operating costs for developers and test labs etc., and you have a situation where you can’t make a really good ROI.
Solution: make one generic game engine, then modify it with new graphics and brand it for advertisers. So you will always see the same crappy games (snakes and ladders, solitaire, etc.) under different names (‘<insert Advertiser’s name> Ladders’), with a slightly different look and feel.
This is the reason that these games will always suck. Don’t expect much innovation anytime soon. Also, right now the games are not heavy on the advertising. Just wait untill this really happens.
Note that this isn’t the same as pocketpc and other ‘real’ PDA games. Those are a different story altogether since you have a completely different user market to cater to.
Just my 2c.
Did anyone else think this when looking at the pictures? ^_^
Couldnt they have just added a Gameboy cartridge slot to a cellphone?
Could you please not put so many questions in the synopsis? This site is supposed to provide news and not ask so many questions…
Tony Hawk?
Activision?
🙂
I’d much rather see a well designed PalmOS Phone, somewhat like the Kyocera 7135 (which, of course, I can’t use on any service in my area!). Phones that try to entice buyers with color, music and games are purely for the buyers who like gimmicks and toys. If I am going to replace my Palm Pilot and replace my cell phone, I want a really useful, single device to replace it with, not something that’s designed to be the product gimmick of the month.
That said, I again must point out how cool the Japanese are with electronics. They’re about five to six years ahead of us Americans when it comes to small devices and acceptance of new technology.
From a user perspective a gameboy catridge would be fantastic but neither operators nor phone makers are ever going to support that. Both want revenues from game playing. They are not interested in helping Nintendo and apparently not even in cutting a mutually beneficial deal.
Is about a decade ahead in cool devices and wireless services and about a decade behind in wireless (transmission of electromagnetic signals over free space to another device) technology. They can’t even get cdma to work right.
Of course part of that is due to the fact that they kept the timing within the handsets as opposed to centered in the network. That is difficult to do. Europeans are having the same problem. All of this because the US Airforce screwed up a few GSM networks in italy that used GPS timing during the balkan conflict.
the other part of it is that CDMA is simply difficult and you need to spend the R&D dollars, which they did not.
I got a SE T300, same as T310 but another design. The games are pretty good and entertaining. Only thing I hate is that they are locked to the phone with IMEI #
But 2003 –> are going to be the age of DRM and restrictions anyhow…
I’m buying the Sony Ericsson T100. It actually has features I want (like low cost, minumum weight, minimum size).
I believe the European and the US consumer market are going through a similar process as Japanese did a few years ago. The Japanese were initially pretty sceptic with regard to smartphones as well.
But quality services and content enabled smartphones to become such a huge success in Japan. Today smartphones are part of everyday Japanese culture.
I guess future games will mainly interest children, except for maybe some (online) games like checkers, chess, cards, etc. And so Pokemon, Zelda, Mario, etc games will likely keep Nintendo the number 1 handheld gaming provider for many years to come.