14 DAY TRIAL // Have you ever wondered how come the games on mobile phones become more and more realistic? How is it possible to have 3D and 2D accelerated graphics on a mobile platform that, before the appearance of such games on the mobile market, couldn't provide the cellphone users with exciting enough features to make the mobile games as addictive or even close to their PC versions?
Many of us don't even want to get into the intricacies of such things but, just for the record, the things that have limited the mobile devices in this sector, compared to the personal computers and the game consoles, are the power consumption and the differences in specifications between each mobile platform.
There are some companies though that have managed to find solutions to these type of problems and one of them is Sony Ericsson, a mobile phone manufacturer delivering cellphones capable of displaying fluid 3D graphics. How is this possible? Well for starters, they are the ones that have implemented in their handsets graphic hardware accelerators, which are the cousins of the graphic accelerators implemented in your PC graphic card.
The next step was to launch a cross-platform able to port the games developed for the game consoles and for PCs on the next generation mobile phones. That next step is known history and it is named OpenGL ES, known now as the mobile industry standard, a cross-platform API (Application Programming Interface) created by the Kronos Group and capable to deliver 3D graphics for the mobile phone users.
Who are the ones behind this new type of 3D hardware acceleration graphic technology for cellphones? The British company Imagination Technologies and Sony Ericsson (of course), the two that have released the first version of OpenGL ES 1.1 SDK (Software Development Kit) for the UIQ 3 Symbian OS 9.1 enabled phones. What are the phones models supporting it at the moment? The SE P990, the SE M600 and the SE W950, three phones that will offer you one of the best gaming experiences available when being on-the-go.
As Kristof Beets, the third party relations manager from Imagination Technologies, says "the most obvious difference on Sony Ericsson's UIQ 3 devices is image quality, it is considerably improved. The other important difference is a gain in software performance. Now the CPU is only running the phone Operating System and the game logic, it is no longer doing the drawing. As a result the CPU can spend more time on the gaming experience; developers can implement more complex game play, improve artificial intelligence and use richer audio effects. As a result games developers can improve more than simply the look of their game."
Furthermore, to sustain what Kristof has said and to expand our knowledge base over the things actually happening at the basic level of the technology developed by the British company for our beloved mobile devices with the desire to improve the user's way to perceive mobile gaming, David Harold, the head of public relations at Imagination Technologies, has mentioned that "conventional graphics systems think of the screen as a single contiguous piece of data, held as one entity. Our technology takes a very different approach to graphics, it treats the screen as many small tiles of information. As a result processing can be done on chip reducing the power and bandwidth requirements. So while most graphics technologies, which started out in the PC or console worlds, have not scaled down to mobile well, ours has. As a result most mobile devices delivering rich graphics use our technology."
What conclusions one is able to draw from all that technical mumbo-jumbo? It isn't that hard to grasp the main ideas in what the Imagination Technologies officials have declared and this is what I concluded about this: enjoy the gaming experience offered by your Symbian UIQ 3 phones for now, but be sure things are going to change even better than you think because the visual experience offered will increase in quality along with the increasing OpenGL ES SDK for UIQ 3 knowledge of the game developers. The only rule in this process is that there are no rules!