One of the controversies surrounding Nokia's announcement of compatible phones for the Next Gen N-Gage platform was that many models which were technically good enough to run the games were excluded from official compatibility.
Last week we started a poll on All About N-Gage asking which compatible phone model people would be using when the Next Gen platform launched, and a significant percentage said they would be using none, because they wanted to use the platform on another phone.
In response to this, this week's poll asks which phone do you most want added to the Next Gen N-Gage platform.
All of the phones in the poll are S60 3rd Edition, with QVGA (240x320 and/or 320x240) screens, with processors that are as fast or faster than the N73, and with as much or more RAM.
Please Note: All of the phones listed in the poll are technically as good as or better than the N73, which is the reference hardware that Next Gen N-Gage games were written for. There is nothing technically special about Nseries phones, most of them do not contain any hardware to distinguish them from numbered or Eseries S60 models. The N81 does not contain a 3D chip, neither does the N73.
Hows about "all of the above", at some individual level of implimentation?
No reason why the higend phones cant get the heavier end of the ngage and the lesser phones get the more lighter end of ngage.
An Ngage for all tastes.
Orophin Anwarunya wrote:Hows about "all of the above", at some individual level of implimentation?
As was said on previous polls, if you add an "all of the above" option, or if you allow multiple voting, it prevents us from seeing interesting patterns in people's opinions.
No reason why the higend phones cant get the heavier end of the ngage and the lesser phones get the more lighter end of ngage.
I think they'd be worried about giving developers too many reference hardware designs to work to, which would take away the advantage of having a single gaming platform.
The more different hardware models they have to design for, the more expensive and slow the production process, which would deter third party publishers from supporting the platform.
It's easier to just design for one lowest spec model, and then they know it will work fine on all the others too, which is what they've done by using the N73 as the reference hardware.
Having said all this, I think they should include support for 3D hardware if it is present, but use the normal N73-standard 3D graphics if it isn't.
Where did the option for the N73 go? I saw its pic in the front page news item.
alsiladka wrote:Where did the option for the N73 go? I saw its pic in the front page news item.
The N73 is already part of the Next Gen platform, along with the N93, N95 and N81. The idea of this poll is to ask which other phones should be added to the platform.
By the way, the picture on the front page is the 6120 Classic:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/images/reviews/article6120classicfront2.jpg
why isnt nokia n80 included in the poll? i want to see n80 as a N-gage compatible device
Are all the devices officially supported by the N-Gage platform 320x240(or 240x320)? Then N-Gage might be the reason even the latest N-Series phones use this resolution instead of 352x416, which the N80 uses.
Since the N-Gage platform seems to simply an s60v3 application, it'll probably be possible to run it on all these officially unsupported though technically capable phones. Some games might not use the entire screen though.
sunnycricket wrote:why isnt nokia n80 included in the poll? i want to see n80 as a N-gage compatible device
Most S60 phones are QVGA, but N80 uses a different resolution. I don't think Nokia would want the headache of converting all the games just to work on the N80.
Before you ask, the E90 has a QVGA external screen which works just like a QVGA S60 phone, so that would be how it could run the new games.
Qasibr wrote:Are all the devices officially supported by the N-Gage platform 320x240(or 240x320)? Then N-Gage might be the reason even the latest N-Series phones use this resolution instead of 352x416, which the N80 uses.
It's the other way round really, the N-Gage games follow whatever Nseries does.
In fact it's not just Nseries, S60 is the reason for the QVGA standard. The makers of the S60 interface have said they recommend QVGA, HVGA and VGA as the standard resolutions for all future S60 devices.
Since the N-Gage platform seems to simply an s60v3 application, it'll probably be possible to run it on all these officially unsupported though technically capable phones. Some games might not use the entire screen though.
It's not as simple as that. The new games will make a lot more use of the online features of N-Gage, for things like online multiplayer, friends, instant messaging, achievement points, tournaments, scoreboards etc. New Arena will apparently be a lot more like Xbox Live than the original gen Arena.
Pirated games would probably find it difficult to interface with these services, and even if they break certain security measures Nokia could introduce new ones through online patches.
Just out of interest, is there any word from Nokia, official or otherwise, on the odds of the e90 joing the n-gage party?
