Yes, the iPhone is already a way hot gaming platform, but Wired are rumoring it will get even hotter with the next iPhone.

“the gaming market is an increasingly juicy segment of the mobile multimedia space — and it’s one that Apple’s phenomenally successful iPhone is well-positioned to dominate.”

Of course, that’s not going to truly come to fruition unless the App Store gets some full-on serious games from big game developers. And guess what? That might be happening too, as another rumor gaining weight is Apple is looking at a Premium Games section its App Store for games costing $19.99.

PocketGamer says “the initiative will only be open to a restricted number of large publishers”.

Each of these rumors needs the other for the iPhone/touch to take the step up to a legitimate gaming console. As Wired says “the iPhone App Store has already got the DS and PSP beat in terms of game titles available: When the App Store was just three months old, it had 1,500 games; the PSP and DS had about 600 and 300 titles, respectively.” Howerver, if you took out all the crap (from all platforms). I expect the App Store wouldn’t look so good after that.

A figure it didn’t show which would be interesting to know, is how many games in total were sold for each platform in the last quarter. That would really show where the iPhone is at and where it’s going.

Yet another story circulating on the ‘net shows that Apple is already testing the next iPhone and it will be a major upgrade. The first iPhone was indicated as “iPhone 1,1” and the 3G as “iPhone 1,2”. However the next iPhon eis showing up as “iPhone2,1”, so there just might be some exciting hardware upgrades - possibly ones to get it real serious as a games platform.

Technically it will be the third generation iPhone so will it be the 3G iPhone 3G? or the iPhone 3G 3G? Or maybe a G3 iPhone 3G?

Whatever, expect it to be serious about gaming.