Hot on the heels of the Nokia N95 8GB shipping news comes the followup announcement for the Nokia N81 8GB (with more of a gaming focus and dedicated game/music keys). Full press release below - we've got no less than three N81s on order from various sources and will bring you a full review ASAP.
Read on in the full article.
Its a soft concept to say this is a gaming centric device given that the specs really do not befit the title. Surely a better designed N95 gaming edition would fit the bill much better.
Plus, the n93 form factor would be better suited for a gaming device. Think about it.
Did some googling to find out more about this phone. It seems like a big step backwards: poor camera, no 3D acceleration and no TV out, standard QVGA screen. Is there anything good about it?
Is the normal micro SD version of the N81 shipping as well?
First Unregistered: yes, price. This is a mass market device (although N95 has sold amazingly well for its price), so adjust your expectations. 😊
I think it's totally deceptive to call ANY of these phones "gaming-centric". None of them are, they're all being sold above everything else as phones. The vast majority of phone users aren't really gamers, they buy phones as phones, and any phone perceived as a console is automatically going to shut itself off from most potential customers.
The N93 is IMHO probably the best for gaming as it has a layout almost exactly like the hugely successful Nintendo GBA SP, and chunkier buttons than the N93i. But the N93 came and went before Next Gen N-Gage even launched, so it was clearly never intended by Nokia as a gaming-oriented device, even though the N93's form factor does have that convenient side-effect.
Forget the original N-Gage, Nokia isn't going down that path. The point of Next Gen N-Gage isn't to compete with consoles, it's to compete with Java games, and Java games are successful partly because they run well on totally ordinary phones that aren't designed for gaming.
Look at the price for example: 6 to 10 euros per Next Gen N-Gage game is Java-level pricing, not console-level pricing. They're going after people who normally buy Java games, which is a huge market.
sorry but no hardware accelerated 3D graphics = no expectations now let me get back to my MBX'd N95 and iPod touch!!