It’s already a groundbreaking phone and digital music player, and now Apple’s iPhone is emerging as a popular gaming device as well. Of the 1,300 add-on programs currently available for it, about a quarter are games, as are seven of the ten most popular selections in the Apple App Store, which opened on July 11. That kind of demand, along with plans for more and better offerings, could launch the iPhone into a whole new stratosphere of mobile gaming.

The cell-phone gaming market is ripe for the picking. While millions of people play games on the portable Nintendo DS and Sony PSP every day, fewer than 10 percent of cell-phone users in the U.S. do the same on their phones. What’s more, the average cell-phone gamer spends just 8 dollars a year on new games, versus an estimated 45 dollars a year for users of the PSP and 65 dollars yearly for DS players. The iPhone with its gorgeous touch screen, wireless delivery of applications and hundreds of entertainment titles is poised to bridge that gap. The Gartner Group research firm projects that iPhone games will help propel cell-phone gaming revenues in the U.S. from 845 million in 2008 to 1.2 billion in 2011.

Source: Time