"3D actually opens up a lot more visual real-estate for games and UI on phones since you can use depth too, and with screens and resolutions continually improving playing games and watching TV on phones works well."

[...]

"PowerVR MBX has an advanced 3D feature set including as skinning, FSAA, curved surfaces, per-pixel lighting and texture compression and OpenVG support for advanced 2D too."I

Maybe not if you’re using a standalone GPU, but integrating the 3D – definitely! Our PowerVR MBX deferred texturing and tile based technology has low silicon area, power consumption, memory and bandwidth demands that make it ideal for providing high-performance graphics in phones. With its PowerVR deferred pixel shading architecture the PowerVR SGX family has the lowest core and system power demands. It’s ideal for unified memory systems plus integrated CPU designs in mobile and cost sensitive applications. Couple that with wide standards compatibility, high scalability from a universal multimedia architecture, pipeline scalability from 1x to 8x and beyond and video encode and decode for free, and you have a solution that is demonstrably ideal for advanced phones graphics. SGX is effectively a universal graphics co-processor which enables multiple tasks to be executed in parallel using the same Universal Scalable Shader Engine (USSE) resulting in much improved silicon utilisation and power consumption than a solution which provides separate cores (2D core + 3D Core + Video Encode + Video Decode + Vector Graphics + …) to tackle each problem, since even when these subcores are turned off they are still leaking power and using up valuable silicon area.

The latest release of the PowerVR Insider SDK, version 1.9, is the biggest yet. It features over 30 variants supporting a wide range of platforms, from LSI applications processors such as TI’s OMAP2 and Freescale’s i.MX31 to consumer products such as the Sony Ericsson P990/M600/M608/W950 mobile phones and Dell Axim X51v PDA. A wide range of API and OS are supported too, including Khronos’ OpenGL ES and OpenVG and Microsoft Direct3D Mobile, on Symbian, Linux, UIQ3 and WinCE5.
PowerVR SGX, the new generation PowerVR shader based graphics and video technology family, is part of the PowerVR Series5 scalable and fully programmable shader graphics and video core family.
With PowerVR SGX at their heart future phones will be able to provide a wider range of stylish content – using shaders developer creativity will be fully unleashed. Shader technology enables superior realism and advanced features when rendering 3D objects and, by making 3D effects more programmable, gives freedom to content developers to create more visually compelling and unique games and applications.

We were the first company to announce official and certified performance results for the independent 3DMarkMobile06 benchmark application developed and certified by Futuremark.
3DMarkMobile06 is an independent and demanding performance benchmarking application measuring the 3D graphics capability of mobile devices and is the only product designed specifically to benchmark system-level performance of next generation OpenGL ES 1.x enabled mobile devices.
Imagination has released these first certified benchmark results, under both Linux and Symbian operating systems with OpenGL ES1.1, using a member of Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP™ 2 platform, the OMAP2420 application processor, with PowerVR MBX running at 50/66 MHz (Symbian/Linux) and the CPU (ARM 1136) running at 300/266 MHz (Symbian/Linux). Measured system performance on TI’s OMAP2420 processor exceeds 37 frames per second on Game Test 1 for both Operating Systems. I recommend going to Futuremark’s site and checking our the stunning Game Tests to put those benchmarks into perspective (http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkmobile06/screenshots).
I love my PSP but it’s a tall order to carry it round all the time… mostly these days I fill time playing Vijay Singh Golf on my M600.