Despite every cellphone company these days creating their own touch screen smartphone with more bells and whistles than Santa’s reindeer and a RAD class put together, the iPhone remains one of the most popular and easily recognized of the bunch. Ever since the successful launch of the App Store Apple has been hailing their own device as the eventual future of handheld gaming.

With their recent unveiling of the iPhone 3GS smack talk is being spread around with a broad brush. This time it’s not anyone from Apple; the culprit is mobile developer Fishlabs. The company’s boss, Michael Schade has claimed that the OpenGL support for the handheld will push its graphic capabilities far beyond that of Sony’s system, though he does point out that initial costs for developing Apps for the device will be expensive.

Unfortunately the issue most gamers have with the iPhone and iPod Touch has nothing to do with the graphical capabilities. The biggest complaint is the limited number of control schemes imposed by the touch screen. There’s only so much you can do with a tilt screen and cramming loads of buttons onto the touch screen leaves little room for graphics. It would theoretically be possible to create an attachment which would add more buttons, but would that really catch on? The people who want a gaming handheld likely already have one (or two) and the crowd who like the more simple games won’t need it. Will the new iPhone deliver a superior visual experience? Sure. Is it going to deliver a better gaming experience? Not at all.