It’s a phone, not a console! (PDF) is an interesting paper about mobile games by Marko Turpeinen, Risto Sarvas, Fernando Herrera from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

Hmm, for a certain kind of gaming the PSP has still a lot of advantages - bigger screen, game-oriented buttons... And games are explicitely made for these consoles.

On the other hand I also think that there are a lot of possibilities with mobile phones not yet even touched nor discovered. But it's a different breed of games.

There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides and maybe we should just not look at it as either or but rather as two possible devices for games. Time will tell what kind of games have the greatest appeal on the different devices.

Via Nicolas

Excerpts from It is a phone not a console!:

Current trends in commercial mobile game development seem to follow the path of games made for portable game decks rather than taking advantage of the special characteristics of a mobile phone. Presumably, porting well-understood game concepts onto the mobile phone presents a smaller financial risk in the form of familiarity in marketing, development, and user adoption. As we have presented above, there are gamelike phenomena that leverage sociality, connectivity, media creation, and mobility. Furthermore, the phones are very personal devices; they know a lot about the user and lend themselves as vehicles for selfexpression.
Also, the phone can be a part of richer cross-media concepts, phones enable an alternative way of billing for gaming content, they are a communication medium for TV entertainment, and a source of extra information when playing in the real world. These characteristics can and should be used to differentiate mobile phone games from game deck games.

[...] However, the learning curve for consumers to understand what mobile gaming can really be about should not be underestimated. It is already hard enough to communicate to people about basic mobile games. Perhaps this is the reason why simple mobile games like bowling are very popular. One approach could be to gradually add features that leverage sociality, mobility, connectivity, self-expression, phone billing etc. into mobile game concepts that people are already familiar with. Then move towards more innovative concepts as the mainstream market becomes used to the special characteristics of mobile gaming. Another approach would be to introduce the mobile phone as a gaming device into game-like activities where these features already exist and the concepts are familiar. For example, Geocaching combines connectivity, mobility, and sociality, and online betting, which is a well-known and popular game format, combines mobility, sociality, money transfer, and cross-media.