We are developing our first iPhone game, and all is going OK for now. We are testing on an iPhone 3GS and an iPad 1. We were wondering which devices should we test on to make sure that also people with older devices will be able to play the game and actually enjoy it.
I have been recommended to get an iPod Touch 2nd generation; since these do not come cheap, I wanted to ask more experienced people for their opinion. I have found a couple of these on eBay from respectable sellers; one is a jailbroken device with iOS 4, the other is a regular iPod Touch 2nd generation with iOS 3.
I looked through past topics on the same subject, and most recent one was about 1 year ago, so things might have changed. Thanks for your help!
iOS devices fall into following categories for performance:
iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch 1G: 412MHz, 128MB RAM iPod Touch 2G: 533MHz, 128MB RAM iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 3G: 600MHz, 256MB RAM iPod Touch 4G: 800MHz, 256MB RAM iPhone 4: 800MHz, 512MB RAM iPhone 4S: Dual-Core 800MHz, 512MB RAM iPad 1: 1GHz, 256MB RAM iPad 2: Dual-Core 1GHz, 512MB RAMFor more details, see this Wikipedia article.
It would probably be beneficial to have as many of these categories covered as possible, especially if you want enable/disable certain things to optimize graphics/performance for each device. At minimum, I would suggest getting a device in that first group so you can make sure your game can run on the least powerful hardware.
I would also suggest getting an iPhone 4 in order to have Retina Display graphics. Retina Display graphics are generally expected in new games these days, and although you could test it in the simulator, I would suggest having an iPhone 4 handy to test it on a real device as well.