Oct 22, 2008 12:10 PM,

Mobile gaming platform tries to out-reach Java

By Rich Karpinski

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Game-maker Hands-On Mobile – with mobile titles like Guitar Hero, World Poker Tour and NFL Mobile Live under its belt – this week released a gaming development and distribution platform that it says will let developers and carriers deliver games that can run across all networks, operating systems and devices.

Device fragmentation – including increasingly a major separation in capability for high-end smartphones and low-end feature phones – have always caused major problems for developers creating and delivering mobile games and applications. One solution has been to write to the Java mobile platform, which delivers a tiny run-time that works on many devices.

Hands-On Mobile believes it offers game and mobile application developers a better solution with its new Hands-On Mobile Developer Network, or HDN, by providing them with the same platform it used to build its popular mobile games. On the client, HDN delivers a small piece of run-time code that will run HDN-developed games and apps on a wide variety of devices. Also required is HDN-specific server-side XML code that lets the network talk to the device and exchange data, explained Michael Temkin, Hands-On Mobile’s CTO and executive vice president of operations.

“We, as is the case with any company in mobile today, have felt the pain of fragmentation very acutely,” Temkin said, noting that the mobile market today supports more than 1500 handsets as well as multiple carriers, operating systems, networking platforms and user interfaces. “Other platforms have claimed ‘write once, run anywhere’ for mobile and never really delivered.”

Hands-On Mobile developed its own platform to solve the fragmentation problem and sees opportunity in providing it to other developers as well, Temkin said.

“We think there’s a big opportunity to help solve this problem for smaller developers,” he said. “What we’ve done is opened up the development platform we’ve used and invited the developer community to use the same tools we use to build standard, Web-based mobile applications.”