Mobile gaming has languished, and only a small percentage of customers ever buy a game for their mobile phone. With the introduction of Apple’s iPhone SDK, game developers are hoping that all that will change, according to RCRWireless News on Tuesday.

The problem has been that mobile game makers have struggled to surpass the the "golden nickel," five percent of customers who download a game for their phone. Meanwhile, a handful of other mobile phone applications are starting to gain some traction.

The driver is the memory available for a mobile game application. The iPhone has enough and the accelerometer as well which can make for very interactive games.

On Tuesday, Sega Mobile announced "Super Monkey Ball" which exploits the accelerometer and the tilting of the iPhone as the primary input.

The accelerometer allows you tilt the device, and through very subtle motions of your hand you can get the monkey to move," said Ethan Einhorn with Sega Mobile. "That’s literally the experience you get; it’s such a cool thing to bring to handheld gaming. You’ve never been able to do that in a handheld."

The strength of the hardware in the Apple iPhone explains why there is so much energy right now in iPhone game development. The key may be in understanding how to marry the game ideas to the platform’s strengths.

"We believe fully in the potential of the iPhone to grow the mobile games market," said Gonzague de Vallois, Gameloft’s senior VP of publishing. "When you look at the current handsets on the market now, most of them have size limitations of (600 kilobytes to 2 megabytes.) The iPhone is introducing a new level of games that we consider to be ’rich games;’ games that are about 10 MB and very competitive to console (games). Essentially, the iPhone will be the convergence between mobile and console games."

That’s a key insight. With the iPhone sometimes displacing a notebook computer for some tasks and now taking on the game market, it’s beginning to take on all the aspects of the next major platform in computing.