Nokia in U-turn on gaming for its most popular smartphone
More bad news for Nokia's N-Gage mobile gaming platform - it will not appear on the N73, N93 or N93i smartphones, despite previous promises, adding to speculation that it will soon be put on the back burner.
The decision not to offer N-Gage on the N73, currently rated the world's bestselling smartphone, also highlights how much power and performance are now needed from a handset to support the kind of gaming experience users want. Nokia said it was "not satisfied with the N-Gage experience and N-Gage gaming on these devices", which has disappointed N73 users, but shows standard smartphones are not living up to the expectations of gamers.
As the phone bids to make the dedicated mobile gaming product redundant, vendors will have to couple their games software with their most heavy hitting superphones - so if N-Gage is to survive at all, its main handset this year will be the N97. Other new-model smartphones from Nokia also support N-Gage, notably those with the Symbian S60 Feature Pack 1 version 3.1. These are the N85, N79 and N96, plus the upcoming N97.
But there are serious doubts over how long N-Gage will survive at all, after a chequered history - it was originally launched as a device brand, offering mobile consoles combined with cellphones and bundled with games. This saw limited take-up and N-Gage was reborn as a software platform to run across a range of Nokia smartphones.
But in a further sidelining of the brand, last month Nokia said it would not include the N-Gage software or moniker in its soon-to-open Ovi Store, but would aim to bring all content and applications under the umbrella Ovi branding. It said N-Gage would be retained specifically for very high end gaming requirements - hence the shift from mainstream phones, on which Nokia will hope to push games via Ovi and its partners, to the high end only.
The N73 has sold over 20m units since launch, but appears to be considered inadequate, by its supplier, for the high end of the mobile multimedia experience, and Nokia will be hoping to push power consumers to upgrade to the beefier N models.
