I have always been a big Blackberry fanboy, so when the iphone was released I didn’t even give it a thought.  I don’t watch movies on my phone, and I barely listen to any music on it so the idea of the iphone with it’s lack of push email or keyboard wasn’t a consideration.  The touch wasn’t much better as I didn’t see the need to carry it around just for video and music.  However, things have changed.  More specifically, the app store has changed everything, and that was enough for me to take the plunge.
  
Apple is once again miles ahead of it’s competition.  The release of the app store has been the biggest development in the mobile industry since the invent of the push mail.  Users now have the option of browsing through thousands of different applications under every type of category.  The amazing part is that many of the greatest applications are free.  No charge, no advertising, nothing.  While free apps are a great motivator, the real pull for me are the games.  I love me some video games, and the iphone with it’s touch screen design and powerful hardware is a real darkhorse in the gaming market.
 
Much like the Xbox Live, the Apple app store allows you to down load lite (free demo) version of most of it’s paid games, therefore letting you try the game out before you buy it which is a wonderful feature and shows the trust and committement to quality these developers have for their own software.  Since getting the itouch I have bought dozens of games for it.  Even for the most intensive, console quality games the cost is rarely above $6.99 which is amazing.  Games like Fieldrunners, Let’s Golf, Payback, Rolando and Puzzle Quest are of the same quality you would expect to find on the PSP or DS, at a fraction of the cost.  While the control for some games does take getting used to, developers are becoming more and more comfortable with the hardware and are finding inovative ways to impliment new types of control schemes, some to the point where I actually prefer it to the standard console control.  Games such as Let’s Golf, which was released last week, is quite honestly the type of game you would expect to see on the wii, or possibly the xbox.  It reminds me a lot of Mario Golf with the cartoony characters, and the quality of the game is just as high.  This shows that developers are getting the hand of the system and we can expect that the quality of games will imporve greatly in the near future.
 
My only concern, and this is the frequent issue with all things Apple, is when will Apple decide that the 2nd Generation touch is out dated and release the 3rd generation, and then the 4th and so on.  Normal gaming system cycles are around 5 years, but Apple would never wait that long.  And when the 3rd generation comes out, which will have a more powerful hardware, will the old games be backwards compatible?  Will the new games work on older systems?  My guess is yes and no, and that might just be the deciding factor.  I am used to how things have been in the past, and every half a decade is frequent enough to have to change systems, but if apple things they can change the pace of the market it might be the determining factor for many gamers.