STACK #200 Jun 2021

LIFE TECH FEATURE

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GAME OF PHONES Words Anthony Horan E ver since mobile phones graduated to having interactive screens, games have been a key part of the phone

experience. And it’s no recent thing – we’ve been playing games on phones for nearly 25 years now, since Nokia famously started including Snake on its phones and inadvertently kicked off the heads-down portable gaming era. Gaming on phones since then has evolved, of course, as phone hardware has become more powerful; Nokia saw what was coming way back in 2003 with what was arguably the first gaming phone, the spectacularly clunky N-Gage. But it was the arrival of the iPhone 3G and its App Store in 2008 that made the idea of gaming on your smartphone a proper thing. And what a thing it’s become. Screens on phones have gotten larger and more detailed, and processing power has increased to the point where the phone in your pocket is a powerful computer with equally powerful graphics capabilities. That power had already been leveraged for everything from streaming video in Dolby Vision to the plethora of ridiculously popular casual mobile games. But top-tier game studios have been taking note and finding a massive audience on mobile

frame rate gaming entirely in mind. To achieve that, these phones are all built on the Android platform, with the raw power available from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors leveraged to deliver game performance when it’s needed, while Android’s support for huge card storage lets gamers keep a library of stuff ready to play (and when you’ve got everything from Call of Duty to Hearthstone taking up 3 gigabytes or

with full-fat games that don’t compromise on graphics or performance. That’s where phones specifically built for gaming come in. Just like with a gaming PC, what you put in (in terms of the tech capabilities of the phone) is crucial to what sort of graphics performance and gameplay experience you get out. The latest batch of gaming phones are built with butter-smooth, widescreen, high

48 JUNE 2021

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