Will Apple’s iPad Jumpstart Mobile Online Bingo?
Tuesday, 6 April 2010 | Written by Tami Bayliss
We have been hearing a lot about online bingo making the transition to mobile smart phone in the past two years, with the feeling this is just around the corner all that time. But still, other than a few platforms which targeted mobile phones specifically, like MMM Bingo, we haven’t seen the online bingo brands release a proper mobile version of their products. The release of the iPhone and the ever growing array of applications on the app store, as well as Google and Nokia launching their own application stores for their phones and the Android platform, seeded a hope for online bingo to make the big step into mobile but for some reason this didn’t happen.
The only reason we can think of is that the operators just don’t see the bingo experience as fun and appealing on a small screen, which is understandable – the attraction of the game is having a few bingo games running while chatting with your friends and playing other side games at the same time, which cannot be achieved in a mobile phone’s small screen, as sophisticated as it might be.
Apple began selling its anticipated iPad in US stores this week, two months after the unveiling of the product and enormous interest generated, with UK launch date of the iPad expected sometime in late April. The views on the device are split – while some see it as a whole new era in computers and access to the internet, some have claimed it’s nothing but an “iPod Touch on Steroids”, but either way – this could very well be the trigger the online bingo industry needed to move to the online platforms, and the first iPad bingo application already surfaced in the app store – Live Bingo Jumbo, which is currently free to download.
With the iPad offering both the large enough quality screen and the complete mobility, it might not be too long before we see the major online bingo brands like Mecca Bingo, or Gala Bingo releasing an iPad version for their websites. These are likely to be free bingo applications, which will act as an extension of the main website platform, allowing members to play away from home, on the train etc. Wink Bingo has already been toying with a bingo widget for Apple computers desktop, and we are pretty sure that big companies like Virtue Fusion and the 888 ladies’ owners – 888 holdings – are probably experimenting with the idea ever since the announcement of the iPad.
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