E3 – the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a monster yearly showcase of all things gaming – has come and gone for 2010. Not being famous industry veterans (yet), we sadly weren’t there. Nonetheless we fearlessly trawled the internet’s dark bits in a bid to find out what can we buy and when. Here’s our pathetically late and non-exhaustive summary of E3…

Some of the biggest developments came from the perpetual playground fight between Sony and Microsoft, both eager to prove that they can do what Nintendo did with the Wii – that is, make crazy money by crossing over into ‘casual gamer’ territory with motion-controlled devices.

Sony’s approach is the ‘Playstation Move’, which works with a PS3 and was actually unleashed at GDC earlier this year. To take part in the Move experience you will first need to get a brand new motion controller, which is essentially a Wii remote with a glowing blob on the end. This blob works in tandem with a Playstation Eye camera to accurately track your position in 3D space, apparently improving on Nintendo’s Motionplus.

There are plans to add Move support to existing games such as Resident Evil 5 and future blockbusters on show at E3 like Gran Turismo 5 and Killzone 3 – regardless of this, widespread adoption of the new hardware will surely depend on the existence of a knockout title that has to be played with the new controllers and practically drags your salivating face down the shops to demand a copy.

Meanwhile, Microsoft go a step further with Kinect, the controller-less, er, controller. Formerly known as Project Natal, Kinect actually picks up the motions of your entire body allowing you to control games by flailing around wildly, sans controller, while the game eerily interprets your motions via Kinect’s camera.

If this sounds like a recipe for endless dancing/novelty games, you may unfortunately be right. It’s clearly clever, but it’s hindered by an obvious lack of buttons and can’t pick up more subtle movements such as motion from individual fingers. So it won’t know if you are giving it the bird.

One undeniably cool feature of Kinect is the ability to control your system with hand gestures in the style of Minority Report, if you’ll forgive the lazy reference as used by every other website under the sun. You can also talk to it and tell it what actions you want it to do, if you’re too lazy to start flailing arms or use the standard controller. It all looks tailor-made for showing off to your mates, if waving your limbs around with a look of hollow desperation on your face is what you’re into. The only stumbling block? Kinect is slated to cost more than the Xbox itself – so it had better be good!

Barely a week after we were drooling over our new iPad it’s time to say hello to iPhone 4. It doesn’t feel like quite the iconic bit of kit that the standard iPhone was at launch, but how could it? Made from glass and metal with a wonder-screen that no phone can match, the fourth-coming raises the game again for smartphones to a level few can match. It makes you wish that you could find one that had been carelessly left behind in a Californian bar…

So the iPhone 4. Not iPhone HD, certainly not iPhone 4G as it isn’t 4G. Only HTC make a 4G rival to the iPhone and you only get the most out of it in a handful of places, instead iPhone 4 concentrates on real-world features for the here-and-now.

Is that an HD camcorder in your pocket or are you pleased to see me? It’s neither, it’s an iPhone 4, but yes you will have an HD camcorder in your pocket. And a fully functioning book reader with more pixels than you can shake a stick at. We love iBook on the iPad and this will be very nearly as good.

Other aspects of iPhone 4 aren’t quite as revolutionary – multiple apps is great but it’s been done before and I still don’t think the world is ready for Back to the Future 2-style video calling. But the glass construction, increased battery size, noise canceling microphone and external antennae (John was relieved to find it wasn’t just a sloppy piece of design) prove that Apple are taking the ‘phone’ part of the iPhone much more seriously this time around. I can’t be the only person who calls their girlfriend to find she sounds like a robot when reception is in short supply, unless she is a robot of course.

The two things that have really got the gamer in us excited is the 3-way gyroscope and the new operating system that now goes by the name of iOS. Testing Eggs in Space on an iPhone 3G has been challenging at times, but it’s still a cracking little machine. Having the A4 chip and the new operating system will truly be like carting around a full games console in your pocket.

Right, we’re off to join the queue down the local Apple Store a few months early…

Being Mac Daddies one of the Lonely Bees found themselves in the queue outside the Liverpool One Apple Store at 7am on Friday the 28th of May – iPad Day. It seems like two minutes ago that we were looking at the bewildering amount of artists’ renderings of speculative iTablets, iSlates and iWhatevers, now we had our very own office iPad to lovingly prod, tap, tilt and press before we’d even had our morning caffeine blast.

Our verdict? Think of the iPad as a pure entertainment device rather than a cheap Mac or a big iPhone – it’s an Apple console basically. Having said that, there is no better way to navigate the web for fun. Clearly it’s frivolous, although it’s anything but a luxury for us. We want our games to be made for the iPad from the off so we are joining the ‘HD’ race with all the other developers out there so we need one to test on. That’s our excuse anyway.

Within an hour of it going on sale in the UK we were running Eggs in Space on our iPad, which is quite remarkable. A couple of months ago we’d barely started planning our apps and the iPad was being tantalisingly waved at us by Steve Jobs as we geekily gathered to watch the launch on the web, now we were running our first game on the slinky little slate.

It certainly lends itself to gaming, it’s likely that a fair chunk of the 100 or so fellow Apple addicts in the queue already own a Mac and an iPhone so the iPad is purely for their entertainment, which it is absolutely perfect for.

Predictably the Apple employees were cheering when the store opened at 8am for the faithful to get their hands on their new babies. I could do with some cheering at that time every day.

John was the loneliest bee as he joined the queue at 7am while we stayed in bed, this time around he wasn’t rewarded with a t-shirt from the alarmingly chirpy staff. If you haven’t got your hands on an iPad yet then get down your local Apple Store (or PC World, but it just wouldn’t be the same queueing there now would it?) and try one. Your mouse and keyboard may feel a little old hat afterwards.