Ooh! Finally catching up on news from the October Press Briefing is Slashdot's rather negative coverage of Nokia's re-targeting of the N-Gage from a single handset to a brand covering the entire Series 60 portfolio. Worth a read to see just what Nokia's marketing department was up against before they had even launched. And also worth it for the comment that Nokia's so called failure has sold more units than all the Microsoft Windows Mobile devices put together.
Read on in the full article.
The N-Gage has been a monumental failure. It was designed to compete against Nintendo. It doesn't matter if more N-Gages were sold than Windows Mobile Smartphones. That's comparing apples with oranges. I still like Nokia phones. Let's hope Nokia doesn't do a repeat with music phones.
The N-Gage has been a monumental failure. It was designed to compete against Nintendo.
It was MARKETED to compete against Nintendo, the actual hardware design was identical to other Nokia Symbian smartphones. Yes it was horizontal, but the insides, operating system etc were all exactly the same as other Symbian Series 60s.
It was a stupid bit of marketing because the hardware was designd to be totally different to consoles. For example, many N-gagers complained about the long startup time for example, because they didn't get the concept that you leave a phone switched on all the time, and that the N-gage is a phone.
Nokia have now "repositioned" the N-gage to emphasise that it's a smartphone that runs games instead of a console that lets you make phonecalls. I know this because I asked Gerard Wiener (the new head of N-gage) directly in a webchat, and he's repeated it in every interview since then.
It doesn't matter if more N-Gages were sold than Windows Mobile Smartphones. That's comparing apples with oranges.
Again, you're confusing marketing with hardware. In hardware terms, Windows Mobile Smartphones are EXACTLY the thing N-Gage should be compared to, they're pretty much the same hardware doing pretty much the same job. Microsoft even recently announced they plan to start releasing games for Windows Smartphones, which makes these devices completely analagous to N-Gage/Symbian smartphones in purpose and hardware.
I still like Nokia phones. Let's hope Nokia doesn't do a repeat with music phones.
Interesting you mention music phones, because the iPod itself took longer than 2 years to sell its first 2 million. Does that make it a total disaster? No, because what no one knew back then was that Apple was inventing its own segment of the market and eventually they came to dominate it. Nokia's making the first really high quality phone games, and it's a segment of the market that no one has properly explored yet.
The fact that so many non-N-Gage Symbian smartphone owners installed pirated N-Gage games on their phones shows that there is at least a potential market for N-Gage games, just not on dedicated N-gage phones. People want the games, but they also want them on their favourite smartphone because people buy a smartphone for more than just games, and that's what Nokia's going to let them have next year.
That actually might have been the biggest challenge for the N-Gage, people buy phones for many different reasons whereas they buy consoles (even multimedia capable ones) pretty much just for the games. N-Gage forced potential phone gamers into only having a choice of one model of phone, which was a mistake (some want a camera, some want a clamshell etc etc). Ideally they should have had the N-Gage, AND made their other Symbians compatible with N-Gage gamecards right from the start.