On Thanksgiving my wife, son, and I ate dinner at my wife's parents' house. My brother-in-law and his family were also visiting my in-laws for dinner. After dinner I did a little experiment that showed me the power of the iPhone as a gaming platform.

My brother- and sister-in-law have two boys, ages 12 and 8. They have a MacBook in their family that belongs to my sister-in-law, but the rest of the computers in the house are not Apple products. Neither parent has an iPhone or an iPod Touch.

I showed my older nephew Touch Physics from the iTunes App Store. This $0.99 game is educational in nature and has bedeviled me since I heard about it and purchased it. The object of the game is to use collisions between objects in a two-dimensional virtual space to cause an on-screen wheel to make contact with a star. Each successive level of this game gets more difficult as obstacles of various sorts are added.

My older nephew played the game through 20 or more levels, then passed the iPhone to his younger brother. He played the game until the iPhone battery was virtually dead.

If a game like Touch Physics can engross two kids to this extent, the iPhone has a great future as a gaming platform. The diversity of games already available in the App Store is truly staggering. Some of the most compelling are those that have been created by independent Mac and iPhone software developers.