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Apple today announced that the new iOS 4.1 for iPhone and iPod touch arrives next week and among the new features is Game Center, Apple’s gaming platform. Aside from the impressive demo of Game Center and a 3-D multiplayer game, Steve Jobs surprised by saying the iPod touch is the number one handheld gaming device in the world. According to Jobs, the touch is now outselling game devices from Sony and Nintendo — combined.

The iPod touch sales figures — it’s the most popular iPod ever for Apple — lend credence to the our thought that traditional game powerhouses are facing vastly increased competition. By leveraging its popular mobile products and app store economy, Apple is opening the doors for game developers to target the 120 million current iOS devices in the market. Additionally, with a now annual refresh cycle, iPod gaming devices are likely to gain new capabilities faster than competing handheld game hardware — a key advantage as developers try to further push the envelope for games.

And that envelope is already getting pushed, based on today’s demo of Project Sword from Epic, a game coming soon for iOS devices. Aside from multiplayer matchups with two iPod touches and Game Center, Project Sword offers an immersive 3-D world due to use of the Unreal Engine. Apple’s A4 chip — now in the new iPod touches — handled the high resolution game flawlessly on the new retina display of the device. Based on the demo, Apple’s handheld runs the Unreal Engine at least as good, if not better, than Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip, which I saw first-hand earlier this year — and surpasses performance of any handheld I’ve seen yet.

Another company that might be worried by all this isn’t Sony or Nintendo though — it’s Microsoft –and its hopes for Windows Phone 7. The new Microsoft mobile platform will leverage the huge Xbox Live user base for similar social gaming aspects, but as I watched Game Center and the software demo, I shook my head. I saw yet another example of Apple beating others by getting a new feature to market, even though, in this case, Microsoft had a lead in this space by a number of years. I’m not predicting the death of Xbox Live, Windows Phone 7 or competing handheld gaming platforms, for that matter. But the ability of Apple to out-maneuver companies in markets they initially established continues to be a key strength for Apple’s future. It’s a game that Apple continues to win.

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Just spotted a tweet from our friend Kristen at Bing, pointing to the latest Visual Search for Bing, this time World of Warcraft weapons:

The interactive visual search shows 3000 top WoW items, in twelve zones.  Clicking on any of the items brings you to a details page with facts about each item, user comments, and links to videos and more search results:

  The data is apparently powered by Wowhead, an online database of World Of Warcraft items, where although there doesn’t seem to be any mention of the Bing “weapon”, there’s already an ad:

LiveSide.net

The average American spends almost a third of their time on the Internet playing games and using social networks, according to a new survey by Nielsen. Social networking sites and services take up the largest chunk of time, at about 23 percent of all time spent online, and that figure is up sharply from just 16 percent in June 2009. Online games account for the next largest block at 10 percent, up from 9 percent in the previous survey.

That’s great if you are Facebook or social-gaming giant Zynga, but if your business involves email or you happen to be a “portal” such as Yahoo or MSN, the Nielsen numbers don’t have a lot of good news for you: the survey shows that the amount of time Americans spend on email has dropped by almost a third, to 8 percent from over 11 percent last year, and time spent at portal sites fell by almost 20 percent compared to the previous year.

Nielsen broke down the stats into a graphic that shows what your time online would look like if all of the activity surveyed were squeezed into a single hour — social networks and blogs would account for almost 14 minutes of that hour, games would use up to 6 minutes and email 5 minutes. Portals, meanwhile, would account for just 2 minutes of the hour, almost exactly the same amount of time that users spend instant messaging.

Interestingly enough, the situation is reversed on mobiles. Email still takes up the majority of time spent, and would account for almost half of the hour, according to Nielsen’s survey. Social networks and blogs account for just 6 minutes of time spent on mobiles, and portals about 7 percent.

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YouTube’s player has a clever Easter egg: make sure the player has focus, press the left arrow on your keyboard for about 2 seconds and you can play Snake while watching the video.

This trick only works in YouTube’s new player, which is only available for videos that don’t include annotations or ads. It’s limited to the videos played on YouTube’s site and it doesn’t work for embedded videos. Here’s an example of video you can use to play Snake.

YouTube is not the only Google product that lets you play games. Gmail has a Labs feature called “old Snakey” that adds a Snake game inside Gmail.

{ via TheNextWeb. Thanks, Kevin. }

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