29 Nowember 2006

Nokia's Jaakko Kaidesoja on the next-generation
N-Gage platform

When Nokia launches its new mobile gaming platform next year, it won't just be available on a couple of handsets, and you might not even need to change phone to get it.

This is according to Jaakko Kaidesoja from Nokia's Play New Experience division, who's in charge of the next-gen N-Gage, and who's due to speak tomorrow at the Nokia World conference in Amsterdam. I grabbed him today for a quick primer.

"We are planning to support something like 5-7 devices when we launch," he says. "Some of them are already being sold today, in fact. So if you have one of those devices, you'll just have to go to our website, download the application to your phone. It's like any Series 60 application, and it works."

Nokia isn't announcing which mobiles will run the new N-Gage app yet, as they're still being tested. However, seeing as Kaidesoja was demoing it to me on an N93, it's safe to assume it's one of them.

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Besides spankingly-attractive 3D games, connectivity will be one of the key selling points of the new platform. You'll be able to post high scores, write your own reviews of games, and do a host of other community-related stuff.

"On N-Gage, the N-Gage Arena community was one of the early success stories," he says. "There was a handful, well, a small amount anyway, of people who really loved that. And now if you look at Web 2.0 and what's going on there, more and more people are sharing different kinds of experiences with each other – photos, videos, blogging. So why not games?"

The community features of the next-gen N-Gage platform sound similar to Xbox Live, which Kaidesoja admits, although he points out that Nokia and Microsoft reached the same conclusions about what makes a good gaming community separately, rather than one cribbing from the other. The key difference, he says, is that full online multiplayer will take longer to grow on mobile than it has on console, particularly when players are on mobile tariffs with pricey data charges.

That said, Nokia's recently-conducted survey into mobile gaming found that multiplayer is growing faster in countries like India, where mobile phones may actually be a console substitute for people who can't afford a PS2, let alone a PS3. As he says this, he swizzles his N93 round to show the TV-out port, pointing out that you can plug it into your TV and play games on a big screen – a feature that may come into its own once the new platform launches with its whizzy 3D games.

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