400 developers from 42 countries compete for $40,000 in prizes over five categories

Barcelona – WEDNESDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2008 – The International Mobile Gaming Awards, the largest competition for mobile games in the world, announced on Monday night this year’s winners at a crowded awards ceremony at GSMA’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.. A jury of specialists from Japan, US and Europe selected the winners out of the 25 nominees from the US, China, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Thailand, India, UK, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Spain, Poland, Sweden and Australia.

The ‘Best Casual Game Award’ went to ‘Treasure Arm’, produced and published by Tequila Mobile from Poland, and ‘Furby Island’, produced and published by LemonQuest from Spain, won the ‘Best Licensed IP-Based Game Award’. The ‘Excellence in 3D’ award went to Digital Legends in Spain for ‘ONE’ published by Nokia, Jadestone from Sweden received the ‘Excellence in Gameplay’ award for ‘Dirk Dagger and the Fallen Idol’, published by Nokia, and the IMGA Jury decided not to hand out the ‘Excellence in Connectivity’ award this year.

The Second Life® experience is coming to mobile.  The 3D virtual world platform, created by Linden Lab® will soon be available on 3G handsets via Vollee's streaming mobile games service.    Beta trials for Vollee's new mobile offering for the Second Life Grid platform (an inter-connected platform which extends beyond the mainland of Second Life itself) will be open to those who pre-register by visiting: www.vollee.com/secondlife.

Vollee's Second Life mobile service will enable access to the virtual world of Second Life for Residents to explore, interact and communicate on-line.  The Second Life mobile experience reformats the online world to fit on mobile phone screens while mapping the keys on handsets to commands in-world.  Existing Residents can simply log-in and people new to Second Life can also try out the online world for the first time through the mobile service.  With a simple download to their 3G mobile handset, anyone can enjoy their online Second Life session while on the move. 

The results come from Hungarian company Kishonti, which specialises in measuring the performance of mobile devices. It uses it's GLBenchmark to run the graphics on the handset, and generate a rating. And to re-iterate, this is a specific 3D test - so it doesn't follow these are the best devices for 3D gaming, or other tasks - nonetheless, the results are interesting!

Zeemote has shown a wireless remote control for playing games on mobile phones

 Com2uS, a leading provider of mobile entertainment, today announced the launch of Action Hero 3D on Verizon mobile phones.

Action Hero 3D, the follow-up to the hit mobile game Super Action Hero, is a fully 3D mobile game with dynamic sound and camerawork. An action-adventure romp with 206 stages to explore, and 26 challenging bosses to defeat, Action Hero 3D has a fighting system including combo punches and kicks, yet game control is even easy for the beginners.

“Action Hero 3D combines cutting-edge graphics with engaging gameplay to create a truly memorable mobile-gaming experience,” said Don Lim, general manager, Com2uS America. “We believe high-quality games like this are the future of mobile gaming.”

One of the more eyecatching mobile applications on show at Nokia World today is called Mobile Secretary, from Chinese firm InterGrafx. It's basically a 3D avatar that acts as your virtual secretary, residing on your phone.

"It's very fun," says InterGrafx's Charles Chiang. "Your secretary handles things like SMS and incoming calls. You can choose different types of secretary from our server side, you can fire them and download a new one, or train them to be smarter. And you can even take a photo of someone, and put their picture on the avatar."

Despite glorious predictions, the Mobile Games market is clearly still failing to compete with the success of the console and PC games industry. In fact, many people are concerned that the Mobile Games market is close to saturation point.

For these reasons, the industry is once again meeting at The Mobile Games Forum 2008 on 23^rd and 24^th January at Sofitel St James, London to assess the current state of the market and its stability for the future. Now in its 5th year, The Mobile Games Forum is the industry’s most established and respected event.

Electronic Arts' mobile games will soon offer a 3D performance equivalent to traditional portable gaming consoles.

Broadcom and Electronic Arts recently signed an agreement to enable popular EA Mobile game titles on mobile phones powered by Broadcom solutions. The game titles will be optimized for the latest generation VideoCore III mobile multimedia processor from Broadcom, which supports HD content and graphics performance equivalent to today's dedicated handheld game consoles.

"Low power 3D hardware graphics acceleration will allow developers to create games for convergent mobile devices that can compete with or surpass games for dedicated handheld gaming devices. True high-resolution 3D graphics will entice consumers to download and play more mobile games," says gaming analyst Billy Pidgeon at IDC.