27 August 2007

New York Times confirms that
Nokia will revive N-Gage this week!

After much anticipation, NYT confirms that long-awaited upgrade over the first N-gage generation, the famous New Nokia N-gage platform will be released this week and if it is true I guess it will be on upcoming big Nokia event scheduled for 29th in London.

Altogether with this confirmation we got the nice video overview of the new platform as well as the short video of the new N-gage logo in its animated version that looks nice and simple and I think they have some kind of déjà vu feeling, like have seen this before but I think I like it anyway ;)

Let’s go back to the topic, this week, Nokia, based in Espoo, Finland, will revive N-Gage as a multiplayer gaming service that will work on its popular line of smartphones. The service will offer games from major publishers like Electronic Arts, as well as smaller developers like Digital Chocolate that focus on the mobile gaming market.

Owners of phones that run N-Gage software will be able to play games against friends, sample, buy and recommend new games from their phones, and compete in large tournaments.

Tomi Huttula, a Nokia product manager, said the old 2003 N-Gage and its successor, 2004’s N-Gage QD, were good ideas that were ahead of their time. “Today’s phones are so capable. The graphics problem has been removed. And phones today are always connected and you always carry them with you. Phones are now the perfect device for gaming.”

The original N-Gage and its successor were anything but perfect. The phones were primarily intended to compete with portable gaming consoles like the Nintendo DS and the Sony PlayStation Portable. Convenience was apparently an afterthought. Owners had to remove the battery to insert gaming cartridges and had to hoist the bulky device to their heads and hold it sideways to make an actual call. Gadget hounds dubbed it the Frankenphone.

“It was a mediocre game console and not a very good mobile phone,” said Brian O’Rourke, an analyst at In-Stat, a research firm.

Nokia eventually sold more than two million N-Gages around the world and released 50 games for the service. But those sales were below expectations, and it stopped making N-Gage phones in 2005.

Since then, mobile gaming has become a hot market. A quarter of the mobile phone users in the United States and Western Europe play at least one game a month on their phones, according to M-Metrics, a market research firm. The worldwide market for cellphone games will be $4 billion this year and will more than double by 2010, according to the consulting firm Ovum.

Red the full article:
Play It Again, Nokia. For the 3rd Time

(*Click to enlarge)