10 April 2008

Ideaworks3D Announces
Airplay SDK 3.5 Supports Nokia N-Gage!

Ideaworks3D Ltd, developer of the cross-platform Airplay native execution environment, today announced that Airplay SDK 3.5 fully supports Nokia's new N-Gage gaming platform.

Designed to reduce cost and speed deployment across multiple software environments and hardware architectures, Airplay is a cross-platform portability technology that delivers binary compatible native code across ARM-based mobile devices. The resulting application can be deployed to all supported operating systems and devices without further porting or any requirement for additional graphics rendering engines on the handset.

Airplay already supports all open native operating systems in the market today, including BREW, Symbian OS (Series60 and UIQ3), Windows Mobile and Linux. Now developers and publishers can deploy to Nokia's flagship N-Gage service using the same game source code and even the same application binary.

"Ideaworks3D has a long and proud history of collaboration with Nokia around mobile gaming," said Tim Closs, Ideaworks3D's CTO. "In 2003, we provided Airplay 1.0 to Nokia to support their connected services for the original N-Gage hardware. Five years later, we are tremendously excited to see how Nokia has relaunched the N-Gage brand as a compelling service for next-generation mobile games on its handsets.

Airplay SDK is the only technology in the world that allows mobile publishers to create a single SKU that can be deployed to N-Gage as well as other native environments such as BREW, Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. There is zero cost for porting between handsets, as the Airplay platform does that for you. The advent of N-Gage is making publishers really wake up to the huge cost savings offered by this approach".

Rob Taylor-Hendry, Head of Ideaworks3D's Studio, adds; "Our Studio has delivered two launch titles for the N-Gage service: 'System Rush: Evolution', and 'Mile High Pinball', both of which were created using Airplay SDK. Additionally, Ideaworks3D offers publishers a professional service to port existing content from BREW, Java, Nintendo DS and other platforms to N-Gage using Airplay. Not only does this offer a rapid and proven route-to-market, the games can then be redeployed to all other native platforms for minimal cost. Several leading publishers are already committed to using Airplay SDK to achieve these savings."

Airplay's N-Gage support has been declared conformant with OpenKODE(TM) 1.0, the emerging Khronos(TM) Group standard for native operating system and multimedia abstraction.