Is the handheld console still relevant?

Uncharted and Zelda are great, but are people happy enough with Angry Birds in their pocket?

PS Vita looks great. Sony's new handheld has twin analogue sticks (for COD on the go) and graphical power to match PS3, all for only £280 - which is very cheap considering the technology involved is right on the cutting edge.

PS Vita smashes iPad, iPhone and 3DS in terms of graphical power, and gameplay experience. A full set of buttons is always going to be more useful than just a touchscreen - and Vita's got one of those, too.

But PS Vita could be a huge failure. The handheld market has changed so much in the last five years since the original PSP release, and PS Vita may just represent an outdated business model.

The 3DS, Nintendo's newest handheld, has had a stuttering launch, and while the lack of games must be partly to blame, it's tempting to see the rise of the smartphone as the real culprit.

Do people still want to play on a dedicated handheld? Do the masses want to lug around a hefty handheld console when they already carry a smartphone everywhere they go?

That smartphone, too, already has games. Nothing on the scale of Uncharted, like PS Vita, or Zelda 3D, like 3DS. But thousands of games ranging from free to a few pounds/dollars. Why spend £40 on a new 3DS game when you've got Angry Birds expansion packs at no extra cost?

The smartphone, whether iPhone or Android, is clearly a huge threat to the handheld gaming market - and threatens to destroy the market entirely.

There is one thing that can save PS Vita and 3DS though: Differentiation.

What Sony and Nintendo must do is show people that these consoles offer a rich enough, a different enough experience to warrant the extra expense; the extra pocket weight, the dedicated games machine.

Sony need to show that having a PS Vita means having a PS3 in your pocket. Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Pictured, right) is basically a full-fledged version of the blockbuster franchise, and it looks every inch as beautiful as its bigger brother, but it's portable. The iPhone will never have that - and even if one day smartphone graphics caught up, the iPhone lacks the twin analogue sticks, face buttons and Trophies.

Will it be enough? Not for some. But there will always be a crowd looking for a deeper experience and I think Sony still has a market to aim for; a market who want Smartphone + 'proper' games machine.

Nintendo has a bigger task on its hands. Aiming mostly at casual gamers, Nintendo has a tough time persuading the people who bought a DS with Brain Training, or Professor Layton, or Sudoku, that the 3DS is what they need next.

The 3D is the key differentiation for Nintendo, but even that will not last - Glassesless 3D capable smartphones are coming, and they're going to be here by Christmas.

The only thing Nintendo have left are their big franchises: Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, etc. These games will never appear on an iPhone, and the company now more than ever needs to rely on these games' appeal to push the 3DS into peoples' hands.

But it all seems a little desperate. In reality, both companies' business models are beginning to look a little dated.

Differentiation may save them for now - but one day, iPhones or other Smartphones will figure out a way to close down these differences, too - and both game makers will have to try to stay one step ahead or risk falling behind.

Looking at the 3DS sales, I fear it may have already happened.

Why Ocarina is 3DS' Time to Shine

3DS has had a rough launch. For almost 4 months, its 15 mostly mediocre games sat lonely on store shelves while DS Lite and even PSP outsold the 3DS. As launch periods go, it was barren to say the least.

Today, though, the Legend of Zelda returns. Widely heralded as the best game of all time, the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D is looking to do for 3DS what the title did for Nintendo 64 all those years ago (1998, for the record). Does it succeed, or is it time to move on?

Not only is Link's greatest adventure still as magical as it is epic, it's actually matured with age thanks to the abilities of the 3DS system - and not just the graphical ones.

It's not really about the graphics - even though they are luscious in eye-popping 3D and more bright and beautiful than they ever were on N64 (and you really will worry about your eyes popping when arrows soar straight at your face). No, what's most startling about OOT 3D is just how well it shows off what 3DS can really do.

There's nothing worse for ruining a game than getting stuck. With any other game on any other console, the solution would be to slam the console or controller down and scurry off to the laptop to look up the solution. Not any more.

Thanks to the recent 3DS online update, you can suspend Ocarina of Time 3D with a quick press of the Home button, then launch the Web Browser. In seconds, you can go from traversing the wild plains of Hyrule to trawling the depths Gamefaqs.com for the answer to the next puzzle. Once you've found the solution, another couple of clicks and it's as if the game was never paused. Just like every good idea, it suddenly amazes you that no-one's thought of it before.

Sure, you might have a laptop or a smartphone you could have used. But then you'd probably get distracted and check your facebook or get sucked into Twitter, never to return. The beauty of the 3DS, as Zelda so brilliantly outlines, is how it integrates everything you need for gaming - and gaming alone.

Sure, Sony's PSP, or upcoming PS Vita, both offer millions of multimedia bells and whistles; music, movies, apps, you name it. But 3DS is a Nintendo machine. A games machine. It exists only to make gaming as perfect as possible. The mid-game Web Browser is just one small (inspired) step towards that goal.

See those icons? You can suspend your game and hit those

Not content with running to the internet for the solution? Well, you can use the Game Notes feature instead. This works the same way - suspend the game and hit the icon in the menu - and allows you to draw Pictochat style notes about the game and save them for later. The real beauty of this, though, is that it keeps a photo of your current game on the top screen. Handy if you need to write down a number, name, a clue or a certain order. It's ingenious.

Yes, these features work with other games, too, but with Zelda, the various bright ideas packed into the 3DS just seem to click into place. It's like the 3DS grew up in the space of one title release. Gone is the DS with a prettier screen - in its place is a smart, innovative and much more sophisticated system geared towards delivering a first-rate, painless gaming experience.

In short, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is just the game to experience how Nintendo's handhelds have matured.

For Nintendo, it may have been 13 years, but it seems Link's still working his magic.