Minecraft portable pocket edition arrives in the Istore

Minecraft Pocket is the new version of Minecraft for iPhone and iPad.

Minecraft Pocket edition delivers some of the basic functionality of the full Minecraft games. You get the same mining and basic building as in the full edition. However everything else is heavily watered down. You don’t get nearly the same number of enemies or items as in the full version.

Also there are little annoyances such as auto-jump, which is rather annoying as you might imagine. The multiplayer also doesn’t work very well for many users, hopefully this will be fixed at some point.

It also doesn’t have the variety of modes in the normal game. You get your blocks infinitely and you don’t have towns or such. And of course there is no “The End” or other such areas. As of right now if you’re expecting the full game it isn’t to be found here.

While updates are planned, they’re pretty much nonexistent. Mojang’s main priority is their main game so this will definitely be put on the back burner until they are done with other projects. And it probably won’t be updated for quite some time.

However if you want the simple functionality of very early Minecraft on your phone it is here. They at least have the very basics such as torches and simple stacking. As mobile games go the bar is set very low, so this game actually looks quite good compared to most of the garbage out there.

There really is no other version out there if you want to play this game on your phone. Fortunately there are several ways to get it and several ways to play. The game retails for around $6.99 USD or £4.99. You can get it from the iPhone store here: Minecraft Pocket page. It’s also available for Android.