Nintendo 3DS vs iPhone 4 - Part 1

It might be a slightly strange battle, at a first glance. The sort of tortured apples and oranges comparison you get when you pitch a console rooted in decades of traditional video games against a does-everything wonder device with the primary intention of phoning your mum to let her know you want beans for tea.

But when Nintendo pulled out the console on stage and revealed the new handheld's 3D visuals would be joined by a motion sensor and a gyroscope, well that's just too familiar to pass up. Doesn't the iPhone 4 pack both of those tilt-sensitive gizmos beneath its shiny steel trim?

While Apple has be playing catch up in the console space for a scant two years since unleashing the App Store on the world in 2008, it seems like Nintendo is already peeking at Steve Jobs's notes on how this handheld hardware business goes down.

The two systems, with their beefy under-the-hood technology, touchscreens, universal appeal, and fancy motion tech share a lot in common, but which is the winner?

Before we launch into the nitty gritty of the new devices themselves, let's briefly take stock of their gaming heritage that's got them to this point.

At first glance it would seem to be a lazy one-sided battle. If you’d posited a Nintendo vs Apple fight for the portable gaming crown just three years ago then you'd have got some strange looks and 'don't you mean Nintendo vs Sony?' responses. Apple was barely a phone-maker back then, never mind a major player in the portable games space.

Nintendo, meanwhile, was the company that effectively invented portable gaming with the Game & Watch titles giving way to the breakthrough Game Boy, Game Boy Colour, and Game Boy Advance series.

Suffice to say the advent of the App Store in 2008 rapidly changed the picture, and if you’d asked the same question earlier this year then (despite Sony and Nintendo’s protestations to the contrary) in many people's eyes it would have been the traditional console manufacturers playing catch-up.

Here's the story so far, before the launch of the latest models.

Ultimately, then, when you amortise the figures out over the years it’s pretty close, with sterling performances from both formats as you'd expect from market leaders.

The hardware sales rates are commensurate (although price-points are different) and the iPhone has far greater attach rates and a higher volume of apps sold and downloaded, but all at considerably lower prices than the DS titles both at retail.

Although the iPhone clearly has the edge on digital distribution (which is thought by all to be the future of games buying), Nintendo is catching up and this is balanced by its massive sway at retail, all of which means it's essentially honours even as we enter the first round of technical comparison.

This is one area that the iPhone can't hope to win. Its touchscreen could hardly hold up against the DS Lite's faithful D-Pad, buttons, and touchscreen combo, but now the 3DS is rocking an analogue nub, the iPhone is about fifty steps behind.

It's been something that's plagued the smartphone since forever. While the touchscreen is as slick and smooth as ice, with all its capacitive beauty, it's no replacement for traditional buttons.

It works great for getting you around Safari, checking Twitter, or even playing games specifically designed for the device, but throw on Mega Man 2 and watch your life counter deplete.

The iPhone 4, with one button, screams "Twitter!", "Music!", "Angry Birds!", while the 3DS's slew of buttons and sticks and D-Pads and bumpers just says "Games!" over and over again like a lunatic.

Granted, the tilt sensor and gyroscope is nice for racing games and the like, but now that the 3DS has that covered too the iPhone advantage has been pegged back.

Likewise, the presence of cameras and microphones promises to open up even more control opportunities, although again this is likely to be a battle won early on by developers on Nintendo's platform who've witnessed various iterations of WarioWare et al already making the best of these features on DS and DSi.

Ultimately, both systems are well specced, but the 3DS has buttons and joypad to spare so for the moment we'll still be doing the lion's share of our traditional gaming on the Nintendo gadget.

Without doubt the most important element in any console's arsenal is the software itself. As countless systems from 3DO to Dreamcast have discovered, it's pointless having the power and innovation if no one takes advantage of it, so third-party support alongside some first-party games to show the way has long been a pre-requisite of success.

The battlegrounds here are very much those of quantity vs quality and casual vs hardcore, and in both cases the iPhone has the former field absolutely dominated. With around 40,000 games on offer from its 220,000 or so apps currently available, the iPhone 4 has arguably the largest catalogue of any games system ever.

There's a decent diversity of titles on offer, too, with everything from simple boardgames, puzzles, and reaction testing blasters to high-octane racers, first-person shooters, and sports sims. They've even added in some entirely new genres, such as the Flight Control-style drag-'em-up for instance.

Granted, not all of these genres are as ideally suited to the format. First-person shooters and sports games, though fun, undeniably lack the precision on offer from console control-setups by relying on a virtual joypad system.

Hence whilst titles such as GTA: ChinaTown Wars and Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies can succeed in terms of making back money at a higher price point, it's more casual fare such as Flight Control, Doodle Jump, and Angry Birds that shifts in volume and tops the charts.

We don't yet know how developers will take advantage of iPhone 4's new controls and the new 4.0 OS, but we'd imagine it'll be an improvement and refinement of the same trends rather than a sudden launch into hardcore gaming.

The 3DS operates a different gameplan, so whilst it's not short of volume - add the 70 games announced at E3 to the 1720-odd already in existence that can slot in and you've got a healthy catalogue of 1800 - the type and quality is rather more polarised.

On one hand you have the absolute killer first- and third-party titles, like Super Mario, Animal Crossing, WarioWare and GTA: Chinatown Wars, which, when combined with more sophisticated controls, unarguably offer a richer experience than most iPhone games can offer.

On the other hand there's the considerably less exciting world of simple puzzlers, me-too rip-offs and virtual horse sims that have filled the shelves more recently accompanying the console's clamber down the age ratings.

Fortunately, the majority of titles unveiled at E3 were very much in the former camp. Most of the familiar first-party licenses were present (in the form of Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, and Legend of Zelda), plus some blasts from the past (Pilot Wings, StarFox, and Kid Icarus) and, most encouraging of all, an absolutely stellar third-party line up featuring the triple-A stars of the console industry including Sonic, Street Fighter IV, Ridge Racer, and Metal Gear Solid.

With those unashamedly hardcore titles backed by some high quality casual fare such as Nintendogs + Cats, Professor Layton, and The Sims 3, it's a truly mouthwatering prospect of which any new console, be it destined for the pocket or the front room, would be proud.

Ultimately, it depends which side of the gaming fence you're on, although even these boundaries are moveable as more and more big publishers flock to iPhone, but for our money the 3DS quality just about pips the iPhone's quantity.

The 3DS packs an 800px resolution for the top screen. That's pretty impressive right? Wrong.

You only see 400 of them with each eye, thanks to the console needing to render everything twice for the 3D effect to kick in. That makes the top screen a pretty ancient 400x240 widescreen display.

The iPhone 4, on the other hand, has a massive 960x640 LCD display, made even better by the 326 dpi pixel density, making it so sharp and vivid that you can't even pick out individual pixels. It's designed to make text pop, but it'll result in higher resolution textures in games, which will look just lovely when squeezed onto the iPhone 4's display.

Of course, pixel density and resolution and other nerdy things kind of fall away when the 3DS pumps out stereoscopic 3D images. That's kind of a big deal. Immediate critical reaction to the device was "Wow" and "Amazing" and "Jesus, look at that thing", so its far from bloated banter from Nintendo.

We really need more time to weigh these up, though. How will the iPhone 4 look when a game specifically made for the new resolution is on it? And will the 3DS's effect make a sizeable difference to actual games, or will it just give us tremendous headaches?

The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Although it's a close-run thing, we're going to have to plump for 3DS again.

So as we reach the halfway point in our new handheld console face-off, it's looking like a pretty one-sided challenge. Apple may have had them woo-ing in the aisles at WWDC and in truth its fighting its corner hard in every round, but Nintendo clearly has the edge and after E3's opening pressers it's hard to see beyond the 3DS for pure gaming thrills on the go.

It's not all over yet, though. Whilst these opening exchanges have focused largely on the hardcore gaming credentials, the demands we place on all our pocket gadgets are somewhat broader in the modern converged world.

Long gone are the halcyon days of the Game Boy and Walkman when we'd be happy for one clunky device to deliver just one thing well, now we have a shopping list of needs to be met from connecting our social hub to underpinning our status.

How will the two systems fare when we look at the bigger picture?

Click here for Part 2: Price, cameras, multimedia, connectivity, design, and the ultimate verdict.