[chronster]

I bought my brother an ipod touch for christmas. It's good, but not great. The iphone doesn't have the same ammount of processeing power, so I think I'm in a fair position to write about my expierence and cast a decent judgement...

First off, the device is NOT as snappy as everyone says. You're simply being mislead by the startup animation. They throw that animation in there to distract you from load times. There were plenty of times where the application startup animation came up, and the screen was white for a second or two. I messed with iDiamond for a few hours and noticed that our phone also seems very snappy when you add this animation to distract you.

The games I played were OK. The best ones were 2d, and the 3D games WERE NOT IMPRESSIVE. Virtual pool mobile on the iphone looks horrible compared to virtual pool mobile on the touch pro. 3D rendering has zero anti aliasing, so the smaller resolution has lots of jagged edges. Just craptastic stuff that I got sick of back when I was playing css on a 32mb video card.

So the 2d games are decent, yes, but the touch pro could play them. Download rats and spears and tell me how smooth it runs. It's just simple 2d gaming. I think our phone is more than capable of playing Topple for instance (the physics processing found in pocket gravity is a good example.) The lower resolution of the iphone adds to it's advantage in performance, but takes away in image quality.

Really it boils down to incentive for companies to create these games. When the xbox 360 came out, PC gaming took a huge hit. Games like rainbow six vegas were just crappy ports of the 360 versions, and there were absolutely no PC-exclusive games. Windows mobile is like PC, and iphone is like the new console. The best we can hope for is a crappy port from an iphone game.

In the long run, I'm glad I bought my brother an ipod touch, he went apesh*t for it. When I was playing on it, I was about as impressed with it as I would be on a nicely designed website with flash and stuff.