If you thought it was convenient to play blackjack online 24/7 at home, wait until you try the mobile game. Mobile casino is the next logical step in the online casino industry, bringing your favorite online games directly to your iPhone, iPad or Android phone. There are even some older phone models that support mobile gaming, but for the most part, they are geared towards today’s smartphones.
Mobile web casinos mean you can play wherever you have a 3G connection. Until recently, it was a big enough business that you could bet anytime using your computer at home, but now you can bet pretty much anywhere. There are three basic approaches to using your mobile device to place bets online: using the mobile version of the site itself; using an iPhone app; or using an Android app.
In many cases, you can use your smartphone simply by accessing the mobile version of your favorite casino website. If you don’t have a mobile version yet, you probably will soon – the market is too lucrative to ignore. You would play on your portable device just like you would on your computer at home. Everything is smaller, but you have access to the same games, the same prizes and the same bonuses.
Applications for iPhone are slow to arrive, although they exist. Betfair from the UK, Paddy Power from Ireland and Bwin from Austria are three European sites that offer iPhone betting apps specific to their sites. Betfair and Paddy Power’s apps only work in the UK and Ireland, while Bwin’s only work in the UK and Austria, as of late 2010, although other countries are expected to be added quickly.
It seems that mobile casino apps for Android will become more abundant, due to the non-proprietary nature of the Android operating system and the growing popularity of Android phones in Europe. Ireland’s Betdaq is betting its fortune on Android apps, believing that while the iPhone has fueled the expansion of smart mobile devices in general, Androids may be the better option in the long run, especially since getting an app approved for iPhone Apps Store is not easy.
There is little doubt about the future of mobile betting. While currently only around 5% of bets placed online are placed on mobile, this number is expected to skyrocket to over 50% in the next three to five years. A recent survey of mobile gaming markets by Juniper Research shows that mobile casinos are expanding rapidly, and could see mobile gambling exceed $48 billion by 2015!
For the most part, the most popular games on mobile devices mirror the most popular games in Internet gambling in general: slots, poker, and blackjack. An Android app titled “Video Poker,” which is not a web casino game, didn’t take long to rack up 50,000 downloads. Another non-casino game “Cherry Slot Machine” is a free android app and it is also one of the best gaming apps for android. Clearly, there is a hunger for these games, and it is only a matter of time before mobile casino apps are massively adopted by online casinos.
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