The UK Mobile Phone Blog

Nokia NGage Mobile Gaming Platform Goes Live

April 4, 2008 at 10:33 am by Jay | In Mobile News

Back in the early days of smartphones, Nokia had a vision of combining a portable games device with a mobile phone, much the way these days a top end mobile phone can almost replace a standalone digital camera, music player or even Sat Nav device.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out. In short, the original NGage was a complete flop. The design was a joke, with the earpiece and microphone on the side of the handset, and the memory card on which the games were stored was under the phone battery, meaning to change games you had to dismantle the phone each time. The NGage was designed to compete with the handheld games machine of the day, the Nintendo Gameboy. The Gameboy outsold the NGage by 100 – 1.

Nokia did release an updated version of the NGage, called the NGage QD. But the damage had been done with the original release, and despite being a better product it failed to capture the imagination of phone users and the NGage QD faded into the mists if history, barely remembered.

But mobile gaming continues to be popular. Most handsets these days support java and there is a list of 100’s of java games that can be purchased for mobile phones, from mobile versions of Fifa Soccer, and Football Manager to the SIMS and Project Gotham and many, many more.

With this is mind, Nokia approached the NGage concept from a new angle, and announced plans to make NGage games available for their current range of Smartphones. Many fan sites of these phones have been buzzing recently with the imminent release of the NGage platform, and today after a few delays sees the official release of NGage for smartphones. Currently, phones supported are the Nokia N82, N81, N95 and N95 8GB with the N73, N93 and N93i due to be supported in the near future. It is expected that all future NSeries releases will also be compatible with the NGage platform.

There is a brief write up with some nice screenshots of the NGage platform over at the All About Symbian website, with some further information at their NGage focused site here. The official Nokia NGage website can be found here.

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