All I needed was another reason to dislike the crap piling up over at WoW Insider. Now we have a poorly-written article purporting that WoW can be run on the iPhone, which just makes my head hurt. To clarify to you geeks drooling over WoW on the iPhone (neverminding obvious display and input restrictions if such a thing were even feasible), the YouTube video of an iPhone “feeding” WoW from a laptop is nothing more than the iPhone receiving streaming images from the aforementioned laptop. In other words, imagine you taking a screenshot every couple seconds while playing WoW, and a program sending those images, in succession, to your iPhone.
Despite what the WoW Insider article implies, there will never be a version of WoW running on the current generation of iPhones, nor likely the next few, because not too long ago, the Mac Mini was barely capable of running it. At the moment, most budget laptops don’t have the 3D acceleration capable of rendering WoW’s graphics, let alone sport the memory and processing power to run a modern video game. For those of you too bone-headed to get it by now, this means than smaller, embedded devices like smart phones are many years off from packing the punch necessary for this sort of thing.
Sadly, Blizzard didn’t even look ahead enough to recognize the desire for back-scaling WoW, which is why WoW, even running at poor display qualities, still isn’t playable on many portable machines. With 3D games of the 90s finally running on consoles like the Gameboy DS and PSP, Blizzard could have thrown in a horribly low-res version of their textures, or even simplified models, for getting WoW running on very low-end or outdated hardware. Then again, Blizzard isn’t exactly hurting for customers.
Regardless, as cool as Telekinesis is, it’s effectively a remote screencap viewer with some interactivity enabled, ala VLC or other remote administration utilities. This means three things:
- My desire to get an iPhone has just increased by a small, yet ultimately meaningless amount.
- Don’t spooge in your pants just yet, ’cause your iPhone is still an overpriced luxury item.
- Keep dreamin’.
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