Nokia returns to mobile gaming, brings back the N-Gage

Mobile phone giant Nokia is about to return to the concept of mobile gaming. Couple of years ago the Finland based company put a lot of effort to their N-Gage gaming concept, which offered a hand held console with full smartphone features, running on Symbian S60. They did however find out the hard way that the role of the pioneer is not easy and often not succesfull in the gaming industry - we have seen this many times in the past couple of decades. While the N-Gage concept was neat, the devices’ gaming features where somewhat limited due the fact that the device was fully based on the current mobile phone technology of the time. The device received most critique for the rather small and narrow display, while the gamepad design made it to be a bit cumbersome as a phone. Technologically the device worked very well and eventually sold more the one million units.

Now Nokia is refocusing on the gaming, and is about to deliver new game centric smartphones, which would benefit from the connectivity features of the phone. It is notable that the recent Nokia mobile phone hardware platforms have also improved a lot in this sense, featuring high resolution displays, far more processing power and hardware accelerated graphics.

“We are reinforcing our commitment to this industry with two significant initiatives that will help the mobile games industry evolve. Our N-Gage platform will deliver a global games platform that leverages the performance of the tens of millions of S60 converged devices that we are shipping each year,” said Gregg Sauter, Director of Games Publishing, Nokia. “Likewise, our support for Java development continues to evolve with more tools for developers supporting SNAP Mobile.”

Nokia introduced a range of games for the new mobile gaming platform including Gameloft’s Asphalt 3, Street Rules, Brothers In Arms, Hell’s Highway, Brain Challenge, Midnight Pool and EA Mobile’s FIFA 2008.

Source: DailyTech