In the past few years there has been a lot of chatter about the development of a dedicated gaming cellphone.

But after N-Gage failure, no real gaming phone from any major vendor ever materialized. There were some efforts to position Nokia N81 as one, but it really is not a gaming handset.

Most of other info about possible gaming phone designs came from R&D efforts, manifested in various patent applications.

Sony Ericsson has their PSP phone, Samsung and Nokia have their own designs for gaming phones.

I wish I could tell you that some real mobile phone/gaming product is on the way and will hit the market soon. But I can’t.

Instead here’s another shot by Samsung to design a cool gaming phone:

As you can see it is a phone, that, except for some details on the keypad, looks just like any other ordinary clamshell.

But it’s inner display is not fixed. Instead, it swings away to reveal another keypad with game controls underneath, thus making the ergonomics of game control much better.

In addition to adding better game controls, this design provides more space for additional speaker, allowing better sound effects, and transforms the display from a portrait to landscape mode, which is also much better for most of the games.

Looks neat and it might become an interesting product. Or not.

It’s obvious, that mobile gaming might be the next big opportunity both for mobile vendors and service providers. If only someone could come up with a phone that makes mobile gameplay fun, instead of chore.

And all the chips, display tech, memory and needed processing speed is already here. We just need somebody to put it all together the right way.

I hope that with all this experimentation on mobile gaming phones in various R&D labs, someone is going to get it right. And it can’t be soon enough.