Gizmodo
We've been using Nokia's N-Gage as a punchline to (extremely nerdy) jokes for years now, ever since we first heard about Sidetalking—long before the N-Gage actually hit the market and, you know, failed. Ewan Spence over at All About Symbian's written a fairly long piece about how we should stop mocking the N-Gage and pay attention to how Nokia's been using what they've learned about mobile gaming with the N-Gage platform to sneak improved mobile gaming experiences onto their incredibly popular S60 phones:
Putting [Nokia] up against the heavyweights gives a raw number of roughly 4 million N-Gages shipped, against 17 million PSP's and a comparable number of Nintendo DS. But now ask yourself another question. How many S60 phones are going to ship in the next 12 months? Maybe 50 million? How many of them are going to be able to play these next generation of mobile games? Maybe 30 or 40 million? Those numbers are standing up pretty well against Sony and Nintendo now, aren't they?
We hate to admit it, but Spence does make some sense. But we're not going to give the Sidetalk jokes up, you'll have to pry our love for them out of our dessicated little walnut hearts after we're all long dead and buried.
The N-Gage at E3 2006 - Machiavellia Would Be Proud [AllAboutSymbian]
Comments
The question is, how many people are going to buy the "phones" (nokia hates that word) for playing games? As it is, the games on the ngage werent that spectacular to begin with - were they? now - who remembers the crack for s60 sets to play those bgage games? IF nokia dosnt step up performance wise, no one is going to give a crap about their gaming platform. UNLESS - they transform their nextGEN N770 into something more robust graphics and CPU wise. THAT I can see being pulled off, considering its a Linux platform device.
Even more importantly, how many people are going to buy games for their phones?
No one is saying that the NGage wasn't a valuable life lesson for Nokia. We're saying it sucked.
Go home taco phone! Nobody lurrrvs youuuu!!!
Don't knock it, N-gage is and was one of the best phones on the market. If only they'd taken the mp3 player from the n-gage and the hot swap card slot from the QD and used them both they would have had an awesome phone. Honestly, i actually pick up my friends phones sidetalker style it's just so easy to get used to (and hard to break out of). I've still got my original N-gage in my pocket as i type this (you know you want it). C'mon good multiplayer games on the bus what more could you want. If they released a newer model, i'd probably replace mine with it. 2 years after getting it and it is only just starting to get old.
There actually were some decent games, when they were leveraging the platform correctly. Pocket Kingdoms, Rifts, some WW2 turn-based game, some decent stuff. Even the Tony Hawk game was well executed. And you don't even need to try and market the S60 as a gaming phone... They'll just sell them anyway, and then you have a crazy big installed base. All it would take it one killer app (Spore?) and bam, gaming platform with leverage.
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