Remember when our mobile phones were the size of bricks and when call quality was, at the best, choppy? Oh, and those batteries which were so big that it was just silly? Today, we have devices that easily fit into our pockets, and that actually rival the computing power that we have on our PC’s to such an extent that many of us, understandably, prefer to use our mobile phones for all of our online needs.
Handheld gaming is no different. If we look back to the early days of the games industry, the most we could expect when it came to gaming on the go were the LCD Game & Watch titles from Nintendo. While other dedicated games were available in small form tabletop and even handheld form, including one of my personal favourites Missile Invader from Bandai, all of these still focused on a single game. Once again it was down to Nintendo to give gamers the chance to have a console that could be played on the go with a choice of games.
Without the release of the original Gameboy we would never have seen the release of the the likes of the Lynx, Game Gear, PS Vita and Nintendo upcoming Switch Lite. It’s astonishing to think that it’s only been 30 short years between the two Nintendo systems. As a PS Vita owner it does make me wonder how far the PlayStation brand could have been allowed to develop had there been more handheld devices in the pipeline. Considering the fact that the PlayStation family itself is only coming up to its 25th anniversary at the end of this year, it’s still got a way to go to catch Nintendo but there’s no sign of it slowing down.
But away from consoles, there’s no denying how much mobile phones have changed. My first phone, the Sony CMH-333 (or Mars Bar as it was better known) had a pull-out antennae and had a battery that only gave me an hour of talk time, coupled with an LCD screen capable of displaying around a dozen characters of text. How things have changed. This impressive advancement in technology has led to many industries moving over their services optimised for the smaller screen and perhaps the most successful of these industries is the gambling industry which has always pioneered new ideas and innovative technology.
To be honest, it seems for as long as there has been an internet, those that enjoy a bet or wager have found a way to do so although at first sites of the time were very limited due to poor computing power (and the speed of dialup internet connections) but even so, these first sites set a firm foundation for the mobile based gambling opportunities we have today,
But as the internet advanced so did the online casinos which made full use of the new technology available making sites more accessible, fun to play at, and perhaps most importantly, far more secure.
And as technology advanced so did the phones until we could own a phone that would reliably play the games on a screen that was big enough to see without using a magnifying glass! Now a smartphone can be shopped for with the weekly food run – no need to visit a specialised shop in 2019!
Earlier games were simple as the phones were simple but even so if you had spoken to a casino owner in the early days of Vegas and told them that in the future it would be possible to read a bingo site review then at a touch of a fingertip go there and enjoy the games on offer via your phone, they would have probably had you committed for being quite mad.
Bingo is the perfect example of an age-old game that has transferred over to the smaller screen almost seamlessly – the game in all of its variations ticks a lot of boxes for many people as online sites have managed to keep the social side of the game where players can gather, enjoy a few laughs whilst playing a game or two.
Today, we see that evolution continue as all the major players in the gambling industry now have mobile divisions in the firms which are dedicated to revamping popular old titles and creating them into something new as well as developing new games which can all be played whenever and wherever a player chooses.
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