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Portables (Games) Handhelds Hardware

The Future of the N-Gage 34

Posted by Zonk from the future's-so-bright-it-has-to-be-pr dept.
Gamasutra has a talk with Jani Karlsson, senior manager for the N-Gage at Nokia. He talks about how Nokia sees the N-Gage, and what they plan to do with the little engine that could've in the near future. Sort of. Kinda. From the article: "GS: So the new handsets which are coming out with the N-Gage technology inside. What's the visibility of the brand of N-Gage within those? JK: I really can't comment on that because I'd be stepping on other peoples turf. Every single product that Nokia has a strong individual marketing message to it. The power to decide the visibility or non-visibility of any brand, external or internal, is really down to individual brand departments. GS: So... you can talk about the future of N-Gage? JK: Sure - that's all about expansion, into the smartphone areas."
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The Future of the N-Gage More

The Future of the N-Gage

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  • Vapid (Score:3, Funny)

    by ObsessiveMathsFreak ( 773371 ) <obsessivemathsfr ... om.net minus bsd> on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @10:36AM (#14767825) Homepage Journal
    I predict the N-Gage's future, much like this comments page, will be devoid of any real content.
    • At least this comment page is easy to use and I dont have to remove the battery from my laptop to go to a different site.

      • Re:Vapid (Score:2, Informative)

        by CBackSlash ( 613476 )
        The N-Gage-QD fixes the battery removal issue.

        Now, you only have to remove your battery to swap
        your SIM card, which is not too frequently.

        Screwups like that are part of the "great learning experience"
        referenced in the interview.
        • screwups like that are also in the blindly freaking obvious category. The problem is that it was designed as a cell phone, but marketed as a game machine.
  • Is to join those ten thousand Atari 2600 ET carts at the bottom of that landfill in New Mexico

  • Does anyone even care anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @10:37AM (#14767837) Homepage Journal
    In other words they're just going to put the right firmware in their high end phones that will let them play N-Gage games, despite the fact that almost nobody is making those. It'll be one of those expensive little side features that nobody uses. Hopefully the high end phones won't have to take on the awkward asthetics of a real N-Gage.

    I'm guessing Nokia overestimated the market for halfassed ports of uninspired games on a clumsy phone/game hybrid system. The good news is that new phones should have support for better games than Worms, but they're never going to be a competitor to the DS or even the PSP.
  • I have to say that it was really cool to buy a symbian S60 phone which no one wanted for dirt cheap (iirc Nokia sold them only a couple of thousand). Other models with S60 were 2-3 times more expensive back then. The only complaint I have is the "elephant ear" type use when talking.
  • Did that closing statement mean anything to anyone?
  • The N-Gage is dead to me until they bring back sidetalking [sidetalkin.com] How could they get rid of such a great feature?

  • N Gauge (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stargoat ( 658863 ) <stargoat@gmail.com> on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @10:59AM (#14768063) Journal
    N Gauge is fine for making a small layout seem large, but I find it difficult to obtain the exact locomotives and cars that I want. This is odd, because N Gauge is rather popular in Europe and Japan. Of course, most Europeans and Japanese are probably not interested in recreating a cornbelt railroad. As a result, I would recommend most layout operators use HO, but N Gauge is not going anywhere.

    • Re:N Gauge (Score:2, Funny)

      by paedobear ( 808689 )
      Nokia don't seem to sell in Japan (ran adverts a few years ago, but nothing seemed to come of it) and their popularity has been in freefall in Europe for a while - even then, noone wanted an N-Gage.

    • Re:N Gauge (Score:3, Funny)

      by deadgoon42 ( 309575 ) *
      I model in N-Guage and if you've been away from the hobby for a while, you'd be surprised at the quality and detail off the new N-Guage models. Atlas and Kato put out some real quality locomotives with lots of detail, and Micro-Train's rolling stock can't be beat. I've never heard of this Nokia brand though, are they European? If so, do they put out models in British N-Guage (1:148) or American N-Guage (1:160)?

    • Bah! (Score:2)

      by blueZ3 ( 744446 )
      Real geeks run Z scale... :o)

  • After the original taco-shaped N-Gage, and the followup shaped like a burrito, the logical next step would be a phone shaped like a quesadilla.
    • After the original taco-shaped N-Gage, and the followup shaped like a burrito, the logical next step would be a phone shaped like a quesadilla.

      Isn't a quesadilla shaped like a taco, only slightly larger and a little more flat? Maybe they should make it in the shape of a Crunch Wrap Supreme [tacobell.com] so it will be "Good to Go!"

  • N-Gage has a future? I wasn't aware it even had a past..

  • The meat of their problem. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The N-GageQD is a cool phone. Most of the people who got them are happy with them. My nephew was one of them.

    The problem was classically chicken vs. egg. There is still (and you may find this odd) a viable market for those annoying little Java games that people download and play. Nokia just wanted to bring the next generation of gaming experience to their phones.

    The problem was form factor and controls, the phones of the day (when the original N-Gage came out), were phones like the Nokia 3650, the SE T6
  • Okay... maybe I'm the only one here, but I was very confused for a moment. I thought they were referring to "N-Gauge," as the very small size model railroad track, but had just misspelled it. (Wikipedia tells me that it's properly called "N Scale [wikipedia.org]" now.) I got all interested there for a minute -- I had visions of model trains you could control from your cell phone.

    I wonder what a model train would look like, if Nokia made them. Hummm...
  • ...it is against grammatical rules to put "future" and. "N-Gage in the same sentence."

    • ...it is against grammatical rules to put "future" and. "N-Gage in the same sentence.

      True, but there are always exceptions to the rule. In this case, the sentence is fine if the word "no" precedes "future". Grammar is tricky like that.

    • ...it is against grammatical rules to put "future" and. "N-Gage in the same sentence."

      Generally, ending a sentence with "and" is bad form too.

  • It's not a Gameboy that doubles as phone.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by keyrat rafa ( 856668 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @12:38PM (#14769089) Homepage
    The real problem with the N-Gage is the marketing. Instead of pitching it as a console that doubles as phone, they should sell it as a phone that also plays games. The features the N-Gage has dwarf a lot of phones that sell for the same price; thing is, no one thinks it's a phone. They sell it in stupid places like EB when they should sell them at the Cingular store. People pay outlandish prices for phones, but not for gameboys. Sell it as a phone that also plays games real well, has support for java and simbian and whatnot, and people will buy it. Maybe put a cam on it and a keyboard for two way sidekick type crap. How such a feature rich phone failed to sell when less feature packed phones sell like hotcakes for twice the price is really a mareketing problem.

  • Bad Rap (Score:2, Insightful)

    by crescentmage ( 892323 )
    The N-Gage really isn't as bad as people like to believe. I will admit that I was less than impressed when the original came out with its issues of side talking, remove the battery to play games, and generally unappealing games. But Nokia has since fixed many of these problems, though the N-Gage image has never gotten over them. I bought an N-Gage QD because it was actually better than free ($50 rebate from T-mobile) and had bluetooth. Thanks to Symbian, I have an mp3 player, IM client (which works with
  • I recently watched the Doom movie and saw one of the squad-mates playing a clunky assed version of a Gameboy Advance - and thought "If N-Gage ever HAD a future, the result would be that clunky ass GBA lookin thing" - hopefully 40 years in the future, technology will have advanced to the point a GBA can fit in a contact lense, not regress to the size of a full blown console...
  • I switched to T-Mobile about a year ago, and got one of their crappy free camera phones.

    The cameras in those suck. And it didn't have Bluetooth, and even over USB it wouldn't sync with my Mac. So I went on craigslist, and found someone who was wanting a camera phone, and willing to trade for an N-Gage. I knew what an N-Gage was, I knew that even then, it had become a commercial failure. But it is a Symbian OS smartphone, with Bluetooth, that syncs with the Mac. Sure, whatever, I traded. He even threw

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