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iPhone: A Gamer's Best Friend on Game and Player
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iPhone: A Gamer's Best Friend

Ed Kirchgessner  //  August 19, 2008


Stats and matchmaking hit the road.

W

hen the iPhone 3G was announced by Steve Jobs back in June, the gaming press had a lot to talk about — with titles like Super Monkey Ball and Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart gracing Apple's smart phone, the "gaming revolution" that Nokia's N-Gage wrought was put in cruel perspective. Yet despite the iPhone's prowess as a portable gaming device, its real promise may lie in the way it can link console gamers to their games (and the friends they play them with) regardless of their location or the time of day.

I'm fully aware that the iPhone isn't the first device to put the power of the internet in the hands of users, but there's no denying that its interface and its above average compatibility with the "real" internet move mobile surfing from the realm of fantasy to that of reality. Whether accessing the web directly through the iPhone's dedicated web browser or via another third-party web application, a world of statistics and social networking tools are literally in the palm of your hand.



Your friends list is mobile.
Despite their wacky URL, the folks at 1337pwn.com sure do know how to write phenomenal web code. Their Xbox Live friends list viewer began life as a Mac OS X widget, then morphed into an iPhone web portal and (as of yesterday) a standalone iPhone application. This free program gives users instant access to any valid Xbox Live gamertag. Everything from online status to recent achievements are tracked, and the program even provides links to messaging tools and detailed statistics for select titles.

And what title is more "selected" than Halo 3? While not an application in its own right, iHalostats.com is one of the most powerful web pages I've ever come across — it gleams just about every statistic from Bungie's servers and then optimizes them for display on the iPhone's screen. While the page's custom graphics could benefit from the touch of a graphic designer, the delivery of content is top notch. Feel free to browse recent games or check your kill-to-death ratio while out for coffee — if it's on bungie.net, it's on iHalostats.com.

Apple's Software Developer's Kit has only been fueling third party coders for a few months, and already we have two of the best meta-applications ever. Who knows what magic we'll be able to do from our cell phones six short months from now.





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