ZTE Reveals Plans To Release Gaming Smartphone Discussion

[Grant Hatchimonji]

ZTE sent out a tweet earlier this morning teasing a gaming smartphone that's set to be released next week.

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[Ed Hardy]

I know ZTE very much wants to break into the U.S. smartphone market, but it's picked a tough time. Some companies that are already established, like HTC and Motorola, are having a hard time competing against Samsung and Apple. It is going to be doubly hard for a company with zero brand recognition to find buyers.

[Mitlov]

Why make a gaming smartphone when smartphone games, unlike PC games, don't need specialized hardware? At least the effort made a bit of sense with the Xperia Play (at the outset, before we realized that Sony wouldn't release many games for it)...but what games are going to be available for this ZTE gaming smartphone? Android games that generally aren't optimized for any sort of high-performance hardware? Xbox games on a WP8 phone that certainly are not optimized for any particular sort of high-performance hardware?

It looks to me like ZTE is taking a strategy that makes sense for small companies on the PC scene (make high-performance gaming machines targeted at younger buyers who are more concerned with frames per second than brand recognition...just look at MSI and the Clevo-based brands) and trying to use that same strategy on the smartphone scene...but I just don't see that strategy as working well here.

[Drillbit]

This sort of platform within platform specific optimization can't be done at the handset maker level. It needs to be done at the chipmaker level, just as nVidia has the TegraZone bundled with any phone or tablet that uses a Tegra2 or Tegra3. Qualcomm is also coming out with its own "store" where you got games optimized for the Qualcomm GPUs.

[NamelessPlayer]

"Gaming-oriented" and "smartphone" in the same sentence? That's already turned a lot of core gamers off. Most of us don't want to get involved with carriers (especially contracts) just for gaming platforms, and unsubsidized prices are usually quite high at $500 minimum brand new. That, and I sure wouldn't want my game time interrupted by phone calls or messages, nor would I want an important means of communication to be dead because I used up the battery playing games on it.

We also don't know what the device even looks like, and I can tell you right now that if they don't pull an XPERIA Play and put some proper physical, tactile gaming controls on there, it will already have failed as a gaming device...not that that helped the XPERIA Play much, since Android games probably aren't designed with such things in mind, and a lot of "AAA" games generally remain exclusive to the dedicated gaming handhelds.

[Adama D. Brown]

I know ZTE very much wants to break into the U.S. smartphone market, but it's picked a tough time. Some companies that are already established, like HTC and Motorola, are having a hard time competing against Samsung and Apple. It is going to be doubly hard for a company with zero brand recognition to find buyers.

Not to mention, "gaming" devices have traditionally had a VERY hard path to follow. Even Sony's Playstation phone didn't really break out of the pack. "Not quite a smartphone, not quite a gaming system" has never worked too well, even going back to the Tapwave Zodiac.

[Mitlov]

I think if someone wanted to make a gaming smartphone, they'd be better off adding voice-call and email functionality to a portable gaming device like the Vita or 3DS instead of trying to add gaming features to an Android or WP phone. Android and WP games aren't designed with those added features in mind.

EDIT: Though obviously that hardware would then have to be built by Sony or Nintendo, not ZTE...

[Drillbit]

Having a Vita, the mobile console experience is quite different from a smartphone OS. For example, a smartphone OS is always quiet except on notifications. It always trying to save battery. On the Vita, the OS is constantly playing some background mood music. Got to say the Vita OS is surprisingly smooth though. Its powered by a quad core ARM processor made by Samsung with the same GPU as the iPad 3. That makes it stronger than the chip on the iPad 3, and equivalent to the Apple A6.

The phone gaming experience seems to be better with higher resolutions and larger screen displays. A gaming smartphone will likely be 4.6 to 4.8" in screen size. I can't imagine this without being a quad core processor and Ice Cream Sandwich. Should note that Android smartphones and tablets have the capability to hook a game controller to the USB port.

I find that tablets are a much better device for playing mobile games. Screen space really helps with control and precise pointing.

[NamelessPlayer]

Depends on the game in question.

I just got my friend's Nexus 7 in the mail today, so I tried to play some games on that, most notably The Pinball Arcade, which just happens to be out for practically every announced platform EXCEPT Windows and the 3DS (read: the platforms which I actually own).

It ended disastrously because of the lack of gaming buttons. Using the lower portions of the touchscreen to control the flippers is one thing, but then there's the matter of nudging, which either requires me to touch the UPPER half of the screen or flick the device harder than I'd like. This makes it very difficult for me to do something as basic as a slap save when the ball's heading straight down the middle drain, let alone more advanced techniques. Even then, I've accidentally failed to flip when I intended to more than once because I tapped on the wrong part of the device (maybe the bezel instead of the actual screen). Portrait orientation view was very nice, though.

I couldn't test Android USB gamepad support since the Nexus 7 doesn't have a full-size USB port for me to plug it into, and I lack any necessary adapters to do so to its micro-USB port. Don't want to finagle with the Wiimote + Classic Controller approach over Bluetooth, either.

Also, a lot of the games I like to play on my 3DS and PSP would just not translate well to a touchscreen-and-accelerometer-only device. Sure, I could connect an external gamepad to a tablet, but then it's a rather kludgy two-piece solution which significantly loses in mobility because of it, and we're already talking about a large-screened device that won't fit in pockets. If I have to do that, I might as well get a laptop with a decent GPU for gaming.

[Varjak]

The 'killer (gaming) accessory' for smartphones and tablets might be a bluetooth gamepad of some kind. Prop up (or use one of the kickstands) the tablet or smartphone and game away.