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N-Gage Future Watch site launches

4 replies · 4,915 views · Started 20 December 2006

Nokia's Future Watch site devoted to their Next Gen gaming platform has now officially launched. It tries to answer the most frequently asked questions about the new platform, something N-Gage Arena members have been asking for ever since the platform was announced. While Future Watch mostly repeats the information that Nokia's given out at various press conferences over the last year, this is the first time all the official announcements have been collected in one place. And in amongst the familiar facts there are one or two gems of new information as well, some of them quite significant. Click here to find out more.

Read on in the full article.

After visiting the site it seems that the new Next Gen platform will not be limited to 3d chips or Symbian 9. Its seems pretty likely that the Symbian 8 powerhouse, N70 will also be a part of it. It has got enough RAM to deal with it and going by specs comparison i read sometime back here on AAS, 3d rendering on Symbian 8 has always been decent, it went down by the advent of Symbian 9 so they added to 3d chip to improve it.
Over and above that, I used to wonder why, even after coming out with a plethora of Symbian 9 phones, is nokia still keeping N70 alive by coming out with Music Edition and Internet Edition. Now it seems they may come out with a Gaming Edition of N70 too.
Moreover, If you browse around the shady regions of the internet, you'll find N70 has always been capable enough, it would be great if nokia officially recognises its potential.

N70 is also certainly alive because all investmet to its development, logistics etc. is more or less sunk cost at this point and it is easy to just churn them out at low cost and push them in emerging markets etc. Just look at how long 6600 lived (heck, they may still be producing them, they certainly did not so far back).

More to the point, I do hope there will be a decent selection of 3D accelerated games as well, so as to have that option and to maintain and increas Nokia's lead in mobile gaming.

"After visiting the site it seems that the new Next Gen platform will not be limited to 3d chips or Symbian 9. Its seems pretty likely that the Symbian 8 powerhouse, N70 will also be a part of it."

It won't be limited to 3D chips, the site actually says so.

But I can't see any evidence that they'd go back to Symbian 8.

Nokia recently said there would be about six phones that would support the platform at launch, most of which haven't been released yet (so they're bound to be Symbian 9 because they're new). They also said that even more new models released after the launch next year would also be added to the platform (and they're also bound to be Symbian 9 because they're new).

It's just not worth writing completely separate Symbian 8 versions of the games if there's hardly any Symbian 8 models that support the platform. Symbian 9 is not backwards compatible with Symbian 8, it would take extra work to make two versions of everything. It would also put off third party publishers if they were told that they had to write everything for two separate platforms, and third party support is something that every games platform needs a lot of.

Nokia are still manufacturing and marketing the N70 for the same reason they're supporting their non-Symbian phones, because it's a very popular model which is earning them lots of money. They were still manufacturing the 3310 until last year! 😊 Most people who buy the N70 aren't doing it for the software, most of them probably don't even know what Symbian or S60 are.

The "internet edition" and "music edition" aren't really different to the original versions, they're the same phones doing the same things that the "normal edition" does. It's a marketing trick more than anything else, so that the average person realises that they can use their phone as an ipod or a web browser. Many people don't realise just how powerful phones are nowadays.

By the time the games platform launches in the middle of 2007, the N70 will be two years old, ancient in smartphone terms. Another problem is that the N70 also has a tiny screen resolution, the same as the original N-Gage, whereas most of the new S60 models have resolutions of 320 x 240 or even higher. It would be a pain to support a low resolution when the vast majority of compatible phones have a much higher resolution.

I hope I'm wrong, it would be great to see the games available to virtually anyone with a S60 phone, but it seems very unlikely.