Im looking at issue for haldheld 'on the go' gaming where celluar links are used when wifi connction isnt available.

Connecting into a central server to pickup game scenarios/surrent level for subsequent 'offline' play and then posting results back (the idea is a tie in to a MMORPG where player can get something mundane done or at least related fun mini-game activity where the results will feed back into the primary game (leaving more online time for 'adventuring' instead of tedious crafting or auction house, communications, etc...)

So is connect/disconnect thru phone cellular still considered costly (therefore to be as short as possible) or can continuous connection be retained (with more frequent server updates/ less connect delay overthead)

Note this is not for realtime player vs player data traffic though that no doubt will get more plausible/reliable

I think a continous connection is fine on a smartphone, I think that plenty of big-name Android/iOS single-player games are keeping connections open and regularly sending metrics about your play session to their analytics server, so it seems perfectly reasonable for an MMORPG related app to do the same.

Obviously making efforts to minimise any unnecessary traffic is in the interests of both your customer's data plan and your own server's workload, but I don't see any need to tear down the socket regularly.

I think a continous connection is fine on a smartphone, I think that plenty of big-name Android/iOS single-player games are keeping connections open and regularly sending metrics about your play session to their analytics server, so it seems perfectly reasonable for an MMORPG related app to do the same.

Obviously making efforts to minimise any unnecessary traffic is in the interests of both your customer's data plan and your own server's workload, but I don't see any need to tear down the socket regularly.

Its been mentioned that the most successful App games are fairly short sessions (makes sense as people steal a few minutes here and there between their normal daily activities (which is the idea for the MMORPG to utilize this). So the actual total time (minutes) per day may not be terribly large. More possible is the dodgy nature of the typical connection, which would mean the design taking into account constant interruptions of the connection.