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3GS apps

J

jmccray

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 23, 2008
144
0
does anyone know if there are any apps specific for taking advantage of the 3GS's capabilities?
 
Randman said:
GPS ones. Ones with Push.
Click to expand...

all iPhones have that capability, what are you talking about?

as for something specific to the 3GS, i doubt devs are going to pigeon hole themselves like that. besides most capabilities are software based, not hardware. the only type of software i can see coming would be things that used the video feature, but i won't be holding my breath for the app that requires the additional resources the 3GS provide
 
tritonj said:
all iPhones have that capability, what are you talking about?
Click to expand...

Don't some of the newest commercial apps also support the magnetometer in the 3GS? So the app isn't specific to the 3GS but it has a feature unique to it?

I wonder how long games will broadly be compatible with the whole iPod touch / iPhone line and when they'll start to not work so well on first gen's...
 
mkrishnan said:
Don't some of the newest commercial apps also support the magnetometer in the 3GS? So the app isn't specific to the 3GS but it has a feature unique to it?

I wonder how long games will broadly be compatible with the whole iPod touch / iPhone line and when they'll start to not work so well on first gen's...
Click to expand...

in order to answer that question i would think that we need to know how much iPhone hardware is being pushed right now. while some of these games look impressive they may not be consuming as much resources as we think. over functionality may be faster with newer hardware but games may not even be pushing the current hardware yet. and honestly i don't see a big spike in this area. the iPhone is sill a phone first. it is nice we can play games and some very complex ones at that, but i really don't see the primary portable gaming community running around with iPhones instead of a DS or PSP for their games it just isn't practical. the Touch however can be marketed that way and depending on whether apple wants to they can certainly turn the Touch into such a device

so the divide may come between iPhone and Touch rather than old iPhone and new iPhone
 
tritonj said:
so the divide may come between iPhone and Touch rather than old iPhone and new iPhone
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I personally don't really buy that. I understand the "iPod touch is for games" idea, but to be honest, it's hardly true that people who want or need smartphones necessarily don't like video games. There seem to be plenty of people playing these games on the iPhone. I had a DS Lite before, and I loved it, but I've been playing games predominantly on my phone.

As for pushing the hardware, you make a point, although I think it may not be a deciding factor. In the console world, the hardware is fixed for a long time, and so developers really have to get creative to squeeze performance out of the games. So when you look at a DS Lite game that was written 4-5 or even more years after the DS came out, it's much better than any launch game.

With the iPhone and iPod, the hardware is being updated regularly, so coders can just produce "average" code in terms of efficiency and demand that the hardware suck it up.

Already there are definitely games that had choppiness issues even on the iPod touch 2nd gen that run smoothly without modification on the iPhone 3GS. So I think there're already games like this. Could that game have been optimized to run on the earlier hardware? Sure, probably. In some cases, definitely (one example of a choppy game is Sonic the Hedgehog... I mean, please. This is Sega Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog. There's no reason it can't run at a high framerate on any generation of iPhone / iPod touch hardware :rolleyes: It obviously isn't well optimized).

But I think the update cycle will lessen the extent to which developers find optimization valuable, and so there I'm pretty sure there will be games that run unacceptably on the lesser hardware and shine on the newer hardware, and that it will happen fairly quickly.
 
mkrishnan said:
I personally don't really buy that. I understand the "iPod touch is for games" idea, but to be honest, it's hardly true that people who want or need smartphones necessarily don't like video games. There seem to be plenty of people playing these games on the iPhone. I had a DS Lite before, and I loved it, but I've been playing games predominantly on my phone.

As for pushing the hardware, you make a point, although I think it may not be a deciding factor. In the console world, the hardware is fixed for a long time, and so developers really have to get creative to squeeze performance out of the games. So when you look at a DS Lite game that was written 4-5 or even more years after the DS came out, it's much better than any launch game.

With the iPhone and iPod, the hardware is being updated regularly, so coders can just produce "average" code in terms of efficiency and demand that the hardware suck it up.

Already there are definitely games that had choppiness issues even on the iPod touch 2nd gen that run smoothly without modification on the iPhone 3GS. So I think there're already games like this. Could that game have been optimized to run on the earlier hardware? Sure, probably. In some cases, definitely (one example of a choppy game is Sonic the Hedgehog... I mean, please. This is Sega Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog. There's no reason it can't run at a high framerate on any generation of iPhone / iPod touch hardware :rolleyes: It obviously isn't well optimized).

But I think the update cycle will lessen the extent to which developers find optimization valuable, and so there I'm pretty sure there will be games that run unacceptably on the lesser hardware and shine on the newer hardware, and that it will happen fairly quickly.
Click to expand...

you misunderstand my point. i am not saying people don't like playing games on their phone, or even that they do not do it. what i am saying is that a phone is still a phone at its heart, and considering you have a battery life to consider no one is going to be playing a game for an hour+ like they would have with a DS or PSP. so what i am saying is as Apple develops their game platform we may start to see the Touch turn into more of a DS/PSP type and the hardware difference between a Touch and iPhone could start to get more drastic as the 2 devices evolve.
 
SurrounDEAD is a zombie game that works with the compass. You physically turn, to look around in the game. (you can also play on other devices by turning on the tilt feature.)

Twitvid is a video upload app for twitter. It's 3Gs only cause of the video features. It's a really cool app if you're into video and twitter!
 
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