WSJ: Apple working with EA on 'tablet's game capabilities'

by Christopher Grant on Jan 21st 2010 10:43AM

When a handful of video game outlets (including Joystiq) got invites to Apple's much-hyped January 27th media event to unveil its 'latest creation' – rumored to be a tablet of some sort – it became rather obvious that whatever this creation is, it would have something to do with gaming. If a Wall Street Journal report this morning – detailing everything from book, magazine and newspaper partnerships to a TV subscription service – is to be believed, "Apple is also working with videogame publisher Electronic Arts Inc. to show off the tablet's game capabilities, according to one person familiar with the matter."

Insomuch as this rumored tablet is a big-sized iPod Touch, and insomuch as the iPod Touch is totally the 'best portable device for gaming,' games are an obvious component of this mystery device, and the iPhone-friendly devs at EA are an obvious partner for Apple. Whether this has anything to do with EA Mobile's announced support for suspected Apple Tablet-competitor, the Amazon Kindle, remains to be seen, but we've reached out to EA for comment. Knowing Apple's "loose lips" policy, we don't expect much.

[Update: "EA refuses any comment on this topic," we've been told. We'll just need to wait until next Wednesday then!]

Source

Tags: Apple, EA, Electronic-Arts, ipad, iphone, iPod, islate, itablet, tablet, WSJ

Reader Comments (53)

apple + gaming == HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Just that fact that I can play GTA: China Town Wars right now on my iPhone, does give them a ray of hope though.

Yep cuz it's still 1998, mac products don't play games.

OH MAN SICK BURN!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy

An apple console would be quite interesting, an extra competition is always a good thing for us consumers.

Bunch of apple fan boys on here. Gamers don't buy apple computers.

Never heard of Boot Camp, Shag?

Really, you don't say?

Thanks for the memo Shaganappi, but nobody is saying or has said its the best gaming device.

Plus I love it how somebody is a fanboy just cause they may be moderately interested in a projected apple product.

If you use boot camp, then what's the point of buying an overpriced, useless, computer? Oh that's right, you want to look smug and hip in front of your peers, 'cause the TV say's it'll make you cool. So has you vente latte cooled enough for you to drink yet, or are you going to finish your blog of unwarranted self importance first?

If you were doing serious video editing, you'd need a Mac.

I use Boot Camp because other than needing it to play my PC-only games and software for school, I don't want to touch Windows with a 50-foot stick. Mac does everything else I want, and often is the best or the only way to do it.

man, anti-apple people are my FAVORITE

psssh please, you can get badass video production on a PC. What's mac got? iMovie? SNORE.

Also guess what? even though you don't want to touch windows with a 50 foot stick, you are still using/needing windows. There has not been a single instance where I thought, "man, I wish I had OSX on here for x application" You fail it.

Wow Reaper Man, I didn't think anyone still fell for that bandwagon (yes, it is also hip to say Macs are "hip")

I still take the 20k that my clients give me for what they expect the film and video editing services my Mac's provide. Maybe I should let all design agencies know that there wasting there time using the industry standard for all their graphics, animation, and artwork for their customers.

Man we better get on it.

"If you were doing serious video editing, you'd need a Mac. "

Yup cause its still 1998.

@reaper man

I use both on a daily basis for design work, but OSX is absolutely better. it just does little things a lot better.

iMovie and iwork and all of those if you think those are professional tools you should back out of this conversation, I'm talking photoshop, after effects, indesign, illustrator, flash, Protools, final cut pro..

I had to talk my sister into getting a $400 dell desktop with a free all in one printer. She wanted a $2000+ mac book and she would have needed to buy the all in one seperate. I told her that she should get the dell first and that she could still get a mac book for on the go. She's only using it for the basic stuf plus office apps (she's was a teacher and now going for Ph.d since she got pink slipped. Fast forward a couple months and she's happy about saving all that extra money even if she doesn't want to admit it. She even ended up getting a 360 and a couple games later on that she wouldn't have been able to if she bought the mac with all the payments and stuff.

gosh those apple fanboys, making fun of pc users and telling them windows sucks and they should have bought a mac

oh wait

i like how i submit my comment. it doesn't show up. i refresh the page for 5 minutes and it still won't show up. i submit it again and its a double post.

the subtlety of my post is now lost D: i withdraw now from the discussion

Agreed Sidebuster.

A Mac makes a lot of sense if you are doing heavy graphics editing, video editing and stuff like that. But for students and such it's just a prettier expensive computer. Microsoft Word works perfectly well on both systems.

I use my Mac for lots of video editing (professionally and in my free time) so I don't feel too guilty about purchasing one, but going back to school and seeing all these students with big expensive Macbooks and only using it for notes and Farmville kinda baffles me.

But yeah, I have yet to see really good, professional and reasonable editing software on Windows so I'm happy for now.

With whatever Mac enthusiasm I may have, I have to admit how embarrassed I feel going into a mac store. Every time the employees make me feel like I'm walking into Urban Outfitters.

And It sucks to see a student buy a $2000 computer so they can post on Joystiq in between classes.

Humor me and at least buy the cheap iMac.

"Microsoft Word works perfectly well on both systems." Same with Adobe Creative Suite.

@meh

for the most part they are identical but there are little things that are just smoother on Mac. if I want a bullet point I just hit option+8, this goes for everything...quotation marks, trademarks, copyrights......

then there are key commands and increments, when I adjust the kerning on a PC it goes by increments of 100 but on a mac it is by increments of 10. This may not seem big but it's huge... the command button on a mac is two keys closer to the rest of the keys than the ctrl key on windows. it makes it a lot easier to do one-handed shortcuts I have to use two hands to hit Ctrl-j or ctrl-y and ctrl-t is a stretch, but people use these all the time.

have you ever had 5 adobe programs open at once? they run a lot smoother on a mac and with expose it is much easier to switch between them.

plus mac has font agent pro that is much much better than any font manager available on windows. If you don't have a good font manager I can guarantee your computer is going to run like shit if you have thousands of fonts installed.

like I said before it's little things but they are huge when you use them to make a living.

@meh

True, but the Mac versions are *supposedly* more stable and optimized better (sort of like how iTunes works like shit on a Windows but is considerably less shitty on a Mac, or how Word on macs takes forever to load). I've used both, and have had better experience with Adobe on Mac. Of course, I'm not a graphic designer so I really have no clue.

But as an video editor, Final Cut Pro is very much a Mac only product, and is awesome.

First off, the Adobe apps all suck pretty badly... but they suck a hell of a lot less on OS X than they do on Windows. But yeah, it's true that if you're doing any kind of creative work, with the exception of 3D modeling, you'll want to use a Mac.
One of the other advantages is that OS X is designed to be used as with multiple windows and programs running at once to switch back and forth quickly, by not going full screen on everything. Windows programs tend to be designed around using your full screen, which kills your productivity (or at least is annoying as hell).

@samfish

Why does adobe suck? I'm dying to hear this.

good job.

Mac development is in general more expensive. Having moved to macs for code development for iPhone I can say that it is more expensive (not as many choices of [reasonably priced] tools) and not very stable (way more app and machine restarts than windows to resolve problems).

that said, on the artistic side, it's hard to say that one is better than the other... I'm sure you can find extraordinary examples on both platforms, here's a PC example...

It was ALL rendered on an i7 920 and a QX6850 -very low budget :( -
http://vimeo.com/7809605

more casual gaming?

again, GTA, China Town Wars.... Hello?
(see above)

GTA isn't the only game ever, cool it with the GTA.

Chinatown Wars is not the sort of content they will be featuring on this device.

They are positioning it as something that will be on the coffee table in your living room, shared by everyone living in your home.

So you will see an emphasis on board games and the like, played on the tablet surface.

point being that I was surprised that it got on the iPhone.

There hasn't been to many good games on apple products.

There is so much we don't know about this tablet, it's hard to speculate. Will it run OS X, iPhone OS, or something inbetween? What kind of hardware does it have? Are there buttons?

I just hope there's some sort of option to use physical controls with this tablet, because it would suck if it's just like the iPod Touch and iPhone and half your hand just covers of the screen.

I'm just curious how typing is done. I really hope it's not just a giant on screen keyboard.

If apple seriously think they can compete with Nintendo, they must be dreaming. They have Pokemon, they win by default.

I can just see Jobs thought process on this:

iPod Touch=me rich
BIGGER iPod Touch=...me more rich?

is Steve Jobs a caveman?

Our world confuses and frightens him.

but its so easy, a caveman can do it

I miss Phil Hartman.

:(

Here's to hoping that it runs Mac OS X because I'm not interested in a big iPod.

When I think "tablet" I think of it for drafting and drawing capabilities for graphic designers and digital painting, like a Wacom tablet, not "look how big the CD cover art is on this."

This.
If I can't draw on this sucka, I'm not buying it. If I can, though, I'll be camping out in line.
and I mean really draw on it, too. It has to be WAY more accurate than the iPhone's screen. I bought the Pogo stylus and it's proved just how poor the iPhone's screen is for art applications and the needed accuracy. It needs to have some sort of digitizer built in!

Great, a Microsoft Surface ripoff.

Didn't you know? Something isn't created or cool until Apple does it!

Insomuch.

I really hope Apple announces an official Bluetooth controller that works with this and the iPhone/iTouch. A lot of the games on the iPhone would at least be passable with a controller of some sort, but are otherwise a pretty miserable experience trying to use touch screen buttons.

iphone/ipod is the best portable gaming experience?!?!?! HAHAHAHAHAHA

Most convenient? Maybe.
Best? Refer to the laughing above.

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WSJ: Apple working with EA on 'tablet's game capabilities'

Reader Comments (53)

Posted: Jan 21st 2010 10:49AM Reaper man said

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Posted: Jan 21st 2010 1:13PM Colin said

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