aside from shitty touch screen gaming how does the current ipod touch and iphone 3GS/iphone 4 match up spec wise? Or is there an accurate way to match them?
That seems pretty tricky to gauge. From what I gather, there are software limitations in place that prevent developers from exploiting those devices to their fullest. As is stands, there is nothing on iPhone that touches the PSP (performance wise) and even the DS often outshines it. The image quality is produces is actually superior to either of those platforms, but the games generally just don't run all that well. Most of the 60 fps games are all very simplistic, visually speaking. Even games that should EASILY run smoothly do not. Lumines Touch, for instance, can't even hit 60 fps. It's a simple 2D game! What's the deal? Chaos Rings, from Square-Enix, looks slightly better than a DS RPG, but runs at 15 fps and certainly can't compete with SE's PSP titles.
It's not surprising that indie developed games would have issues, but even titles from larger publishers tend to struggle a bit.
So, specs wise, the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 both should be more powerful than the PSP or DS. They have MUCH faster clockspeeds, more memory, and more features on the GPU. In practice, however, those advantages are nowhere to be seen. :\
Android phones seem even worse. OS performance is terrible and all but the simplest games tend to run at very poor framerates.
3DS seems like it will set a new portable benchmark and we probably won't see graphics performance beyond that in games for a while (on a handheld).
