Mobile Gaming Market Tops $800 Million in 2010

Ad support will drive 12.3% of mobile gaming revenues by 2014. Casual gaming on the mobile platform has driven adoption of mobile games to more than a quarter of mobile subscribers and more than one in five members of the US population, eMarketer estimates.

This year, 64 million people will play mobile games at least monthly, a number that will rise to 94.9 million by 2014. eMarketer’s estimates exclude mobile users who play preinstalled games, which offer publishers decent brand exposure but little in the way of monetization opportunities.

While games are currently popular on both smartphones and feature phones, the composition of the mobile gaming audience will shift further toward smartphones as they increase in penetration across the population. According to comScore, smartphone gamers now account for 42% of the total. Still, both groups of gamers tend to prefer traditional casual games like Scrabble and Sudoku, though heavier gamers enjoy advanced offerings that are beginning to converge with console games.

eMarketer expects revenues from mobile gaming to reach nearly $850 million this year, with the vast majority coming from paid downloads. By 2014, mobile gaming revenues will top $1.5 billion.

Over the same period, ad support will nearly double in importance, accounting for 6.5% of revenues in 2010 and 12.3% of the total in 2014.

That makes for a sizeable mobile gaming market, but mobile still makes up only a small amount of all gaming revenues. According to TNS and Newzoo, just 4% of US video game revenues came from mobile.

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Apple has published its App Store Review Guidelines

Apple has relaxed its infamous restrictions  on what development tools can be used to create iOS apps: it has also published its App Store Review Guidelines for the first time.

In a statement, the company said that “we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps. We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store.”

The document has been made available on Apple’s online developer website, but quickly made its way onto the wider web.

The document gives guidelines on content, user interface and other matters that may get apps rejected from the App Store. It also has some zingy one-liners.

App Store Guidelines

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NOKIA C SERIES COMING SOON

We have been hearing about Nokia's C-Series for quite some time now. It was first heard of back in July when Nokia was caught trying to patent its X and C-Series brands. While we are aware of what the X-Series would be like, little was known about the C-Series.

On February 3, a leaked image of what is thought to be one of the first C-Series devices to be launched by Nokia started doing the rounds of the Interweb. The phone in the pictures is known as the C5. The C5 looks like a very compact candy bar phone running Series 60. What is confusing is the need fro the C-Series naming scheme. We wonder what the C-Series stands for. The E-Series and the N-Series for example stand for "Enterprise" and "Entertainment" respectively (The "En" from Entertainment was replaced by an "N" in case of the latter). From what we have seen from the leaked photos, the phone seems to be very compact. So, is the C-Series a new line-up of compact devices? Well, we're just guessing!
 

As for the C5, the phone seems to be decently spec-ed. It features a not so large 2.2 -inch QVGA display, a 3.2 megapixel camera (more than enough, if it's a good one!), HSPA and FM Radio. Also included are a 3.5mm jack and support for microSD cards to increase the 50MB internal memory. This one might just be released in the months to come. Nokia has scheduled its own press event as an alternative to the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona in which is it not participating. Hopefully, the C-Series would be officially announced there.

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New Nokia X3 and X6 Mobile Phones

Nokia X3

It is a quad-band GSM terminal without 3G, with keypad in slider format. As for connection, it has Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP stereo audio, with an input of microSD cards

But the point of this terminal, like all X Series is its compatibility with music. This Nokia X3 has a compatible player com MP3, AAC and WMA, besides having RDS FM radio. With a3.2 megapixel camera can take photos and videos, the latter at a resolution of QVGA (320 × 240 pixels), this puts us sad, the resolution is too low.

Obviously with integrated Ovi services and use the Symbian operating system. Available later this year for only 170$. Let’s see how these figure changes when it launches in Indian market.

Nokia X6

The new X6 is the new Nokia Music terminal range low to medium term, it has a large 3.2-inch touchscreen in 16:9 format, perfect for watching videos. It includes a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual flash, video recording, HSDPA network compatible memory and a 32GB in box thanks to a microSD card.

Is compatible with Bluetooth 2.0, includes an A-GPS and WiFi, even supports China’s WAPI WLAN networks.

This Nokia X6 is actually an update to the acclaimed Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. It will be available later this year, for 650$.

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