iPhone fallout: N’Gai Croal predicts the winners and losers

What we like about N’gai Croal is how he’s able to pull off asking some of the tough questions that would get other games and tech reporters shot (by French ninjas, no less). He let us know of a funny new post to his tech blog where he discusses, in an iTunes playlist style, who should be watching out for themselves in a future filled with Apple’s iPhone. Some of them you might know because you own these pieces of tech now: the PSP and DS.

On the PSP side, which is at number seven, he notes how the development of the iPhone could eat into the mobile media industry that Sony‘s trying to get a handle on. He writes,

After all, the iPod has iTunes (with music, movies, TV and games); while the PSP has the PlayStation Network (for PS2 games that can run on the PSP’s emulator and…nothing else right now – more than two years after its launch.)

Suffice it to say that with the advent of even more tech that’s touch-screen enabled, Sony really ought to think about following suit, possibly integrating it with their now-famous XMB interface.

Nintendo’s dual-screen handheld doesn’t really have a lot to fear from the iPhone, at least when it comes to getting sold. The problem will lie in sustaining the interests of casual owners. Croal asks: “How long will it take publishers to bring knockoffs to the touch-enabled iPhone, along with other games that take advantage of the iPhone’s audio, video and communications capabilities?”

While we could talk about how Apple should be afraid of its own iPhone announcement (it’s at number two, by the way), one of them will really hit us hard. That’s the one in which Croal talks about us, as Time’s People of the Year. Do we really want to spend a couple of hundred dollars for a phone/medium-range PC/ portable movie theater? Personally, if my iPhone doesn’t make my coffee in the morning, I’ll stick to my bulky, but lovable, Hello Kitty custom-case home computer, thank you very much.

What we like about N’gai Croal is how he’s able to pull off asking some of the tough questions that would get other games and tech reporters shot (by French ninjas, no less). He let us know of a funny new post to his tech blog where he discusses, in an iTunes playlist style, who should be watching out for themselves in a future filled with Apple’s iPhone. Some of them you might know because you own these pieces of tech now: the PSP and DS.

On the PSP side, which is at number seven, he notes how the development of the iPhone could eat into the mobile media industry that Sony‘s trying to get a handle on. He writes,

After all, the iPod has iTunes (with music, movies, TV and games); while the PSP has the PlayStation Network (for PS2 games that can run on the PSP’s emulator and…nothing else right now – more than two years after its launch.)

Suffice it to say that with the advent of even more tech that’s touch-screen enabled, Sony really ought to think about following suit, possibly integrating it with their now-famous XMB interface.

Nintendo’s dual-screen handheld doesn’t really have a lot to fear from the iPhone, at least when it comes to getting sold. The problem will lie in sustaining the interests of casual owners. Croal asks: “How long will it take publishers to bring knockoffs to the touch-enabled iPhone, along with other games that take advantage of the iPhone’s audio, video and communications capabilities?”

While we could talk about how Apple should be afraid of its own iPhone announcement (it’s at number two, by the way), one of them will really hit us hard. That’s the one in which Croal talks about us, as Time’s People of the Year. Do we really want to spend a couple of hundred dollars for a phone/medium-range PC/ portable movie theater? Personally, if my iPhone doesn’t make my coffee in the morning, I’ll stick to my bulky, but lovable, Hello Kitty custom-case home computer, thank you very much.