Mobile gaming has become a huge market and developers are looking forward to new technology as phones become more powerful. Sony took the leap by creating a gaming phone recently by creating the PlayStation phone, the Sony Ericson Xperia Play, which offers several PlayStation One titles and runs Android Gingerbread 2.3. Now a patent filing by Microsoft shows that the makers of Windows Phone are also keeping gamers in mind as they develop their next generation of phone technology.
The patent shows a slider phone with a removable portion undercarriage that can be replaced with one of many accessories which can interact with the main unit even wirelessly after it has been removed. The removable piece can be a physical keyboard, an extra battery, a mobile phone handset or a game controller.
The controller appears in the attached figures as a phone button control set up with a single nub. The patent describes separating the controller accessory from the main unit as it is attached to a television or monitor displaying the game. Check out a visualization of the arrangement of accessories from the patent in the figures below:
Not to forget multi-player gaming the patent mentions the ability for the phone to connect to multiple accessories at once. This would allow more than one user at a time to play a game on the phone’s screen or on the attached television. It won’t be long before Xbox games will be able to play smoothly on a mobile phone chipset, and then this mobile console concept could easily catch on.
When and if that technology becomes a reality, Microsoft had better be be prepared. If Xbox were to go the same route as Sony and re-release old games for the mobile platform games like Halo: Combat Evolved or Fable would definitely attract buyers.
Now that Microsoft has announced that they will be including Xbox Live in the tablet focused Windows 8 the next step forward into the mobile gaming could easily be gaming phones but will it be this accessory heavy slider? A gamer that also sends text messages would of course want to have access to both the physical keyboard and the game controller attachments, but to make the most of all functions, would you have to carry a Windows utility belt?
Would you use a phone with a swap out slide out? Are you willing to carry a utility belt of accessories for your phone? Leave us your thoughts in the comments.
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