New research claims that 90 percent of respondents who play games found gaming on a BlackBerry device or other smartphone a better experience than on a traditional mobile phone.

Magmic Games Inc. and Information Solutions Group released that market research survey polling users of mobile entertainment content on smartphone devices. The results show that the BlackBerry is not all business and email, but is valued for games as well.

"The key finding from this research is that out of our huge base of BlackBerry or other smartphone clients, the overwhelming response was that they view their phone as a superior entertainment device," said Nicholas Reichenbach, vice president of publishing at Magmic Games, Ottawa, Canada.

"Ninety-one percent of [those polled] said they won't switch back to a regular feature phone," he said. "Mobile entertainment has created a dependency for these customers."

Eighty-thousand BlackBerry or other smartphone users were polled and 3,700 responded to this survey. Eighty-three percent of those polled were ages 22-49 -- a prime purchasing demographic.

The 91 percent who prefer playing games on a BlackBerry device or other smartphone device cited reasons such as better image quality, larger screen size, easier controls and easier product downloading.

Magmic develops and publishes mobile entertainment with more than 80 titles in action, sports, casino, puzzle retro and multiplayer genres across mobile platforms.

Partners of Magmic have included THQ Wireless, Glu Mobile, Hands-On Mobile, PopCap Games and Konami. Magmic games include Frogger, Monopoly Tycoon, Call of Duty and Chuzzle.

Magmic is not currently running ads in its mobile games.

"There is a lot of opportunity for advertisers and marketers to transcend their budget into another growing medium," Mr. Reichenbach said.

Other results from the survey showed that 45 percent earned an annual household income of $100,000 or more, with 63 percent working as business executives and professionals.

Puzzle games such as Tetris and Sudoku are the most popular game genre, with 60 percent of respondents stating that they liked those games.

Randomly selected users were polled Jan. 25 through Feb. 2. Of the group 70 percent of respondents were male and the rest female.

"The challenge that a marketer would have is being able to get to that one-to-one relationship," Mr. Reichenbach said.

"It's about choosing the right partner and understanding the value they bring -- how many users and how much one-to-one data can they gather from that?" he said. "The key challenge is if you can abstract value from that one-to-one recurring relationship."