id Software's John Carmack gave his annual keynote address at QuakeCon yesterday and PlanetQuake4.net and GameSpy have writeups. Among other things, Carmack mentioned that id's next game will be a 3D action game though they are "are branching out into different directions" with the project. The game will use an advanced version of the MegaTexture technology powering Quake Wars so we should see plenty of outdoor areas. As for his cellphone projects, Carmack had this to say

"The cell phone platform stuff has been really pretty fun," said Carmack on his side projects developing cell phone games. "I look at that and think, 'This would have been such a cool environment to learn programming and game development on.'" "I tell people now, if you want a professional programmer, programming something on the cell phone might be a really good way to start, because you can just do it in Java, and you don't have to learn DX9 to get stuff on the screen. I look back at how I learned programming on an Apple II; there was a lot of benefit to being able to write a couple-of-pages program to see stuff happen on the screen that you really don't get with PC development nowadays."