Well, the expected Tuesday switch-on of N-Gage failed to happen (so far), but in the meantime Krisse and Ewan have been looking at already available games to keep you going. Krisse reviews the huge Atlantic Redux, for S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3, while Ewan reviews the J2ME-based Tomb Raider: Anniversary edition.
Read on in the full article.
Unacceptable. What is with Nokia's Marketing team? How can they get away with this type of stuff?
If you want to do WHEN ITS DONE, say it. WHEN ITS DONE. Don't start giving dates like November 2007, oh whoops no, December 2007, wait sometime near the end, OK Tuesday, OK Wait not tuesday just relax it will be out.
This wastes consumer's attention and time and makes them look like fools. I am not happy!
I think what Nokia should have done is said they were starting public Beta testing, and avoided all use of the word "launch".
It's understandable if they want to beta test an online gaming service with large numbers of people, that would have gone down fine, and people would have understood that the service wasn't perfect because it was still being tested.
But like unregistered says it's not so understandable if Nokia claim they're going to launch and then don't, it makes everything seem unclear and unreliable.
I would like to see how many people would be slagging off apple if they said something would lauch at a given date and then did nothing.
Clearly unacceptable Nokia.
Whilst I accept that this is a Nokia friendly site I think a comment from the site about this failure is in order....
I think Nokia ows us a free n-gage game of choice for spoiling Christmas. They are late, late and more late. Any more late and customers will call them late Nokia 😉
Whilst I accept that this is a Nokia friendly site I think a comment from the site about this failure is in order....
This isn't a "nokia-friendly" site, it's devoted to Symbian which is jointly owned by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Siemens and other mobile and network companies. The S60 interface is owned by Nokia, and the UIQ interface is jointly owned by Sony Ericsson and Motorola. There are also many non-shareholder mobile companies who own Symbian licences such as BenQ, LG, Fujitsu and Sharp:
http://www.symbian.com/about/overview/ownership/ownership.html
http://www.symbian.com/about/overview/licensees/licensees.html
In fact Symbian phones are currently being manufactured by pretty much every handset maker except Apple.
The reason we cover Nokia so much is that they represent by far the largest share of the general phone market, 39%, which is more than twice the share of their nearest rival. They also represent a majority of the smartphone market, a majority of the Symbian market, and bring out far more handset models per year than anyone else. It would be odd if we didn't give them priority in the amount of coverage, but we do still criticise them (sometimes very heavily) if we think they've done something wrong.
As for commenting on the N-Gage launch, AAS already did a podcast several days ago about whether Nokia has fluffed it:
Personally, I still think they should just come out and say this is a public beta test, and they'll decide on a launch date based on how the test goes. That's perfectly normal procedure for online services, and it's how they handled the Nokia Maps and Nokia Music Store launches.
Giving dates and failing to meet them is the worst possible course of action.
sorry Krisse.
I feel that you have taken my comments not in the vain they were meant.
Nokia has messed a major lauch date and there is no obvious comment about this on All About Symbian. If the launch had happened on time then I feel there would be headline news about this on AAS.
Is this fair reporting?
Is it completely unreasonable for some one to feel that this is a 'Nokia friendly site' ?
Er... *when* did they miss a launch date? All Nokia has said is that N-Gage was delayed to Dec 2007. Apart from that delay, the Tuesday date from this week was rumour and nothing more.
Mind you, if Jan 1st comes and goes then the original delay wll turn into a disaster 8-)
Nokia has messed a major lauch date and there is no obvious comment about this on All About Symbian.
But it wasn't a major launch date, it was purely a rumour spread by some unofficial sites. No one at Nokia ever made an announcement that they would launch on Tuesday. Note that in the story Steve reported it as the EXPECTED date, not the announced date.
The only announcement was some time this week, which means there's still four days to go.
It would be unfair reporting if we criticised Nokia for missing a date which they never actually announced.
When the iPhone was due to launch in Europe, many many unofficial sites reported that it would be a 3G model. It wasn't 3G, but Apple never said it would be. Unofficial sites confuse rumours with announcements all the time.
If the launch had happened on time then I feel there would be headline news about this on AAS.
As Steve says, Nokia's only missed date so far is November, and they already announced they were going to miss it in advance. And yes, we did run a story about that when it happened.
If they miss this week that will be another missed date (they did say this week on their blog), and if they miss December that will be another missed date, but so far they still have time to keep to what they have announced.
If they miss either or both of these dates, we will (as always) do a story about it.
Incidentally, I'd add a note of caution before calling anything a disaster because this kind of launch is completely different to consoles.
This will be by far the softest launch in gaming history because it's not trying to build up a hardware platform: the compatible phones are already in tens of millions of people's pockets. People are buying these phones primarily as phones, and the games (whenever they go live) will be one of many services they use.
This is a completely different situation to the original N-Gage, where people were buying it mostly for the games and being disappointed by their scaricity and initial low quality. This meant fewer people bought the hardware, which started a vicious circle. This isn't going to happen with Next Gen N-Gage because no one is buying the compatible hardware primarily for the games.
The original gen N-Gage launched completely on time, and it was a disaster partly because of it: it launched without the Arena being fully functional, without any exclusive games and without any first party games. If they'd delayed the original N-Gage until titles like Pathway To Glory and Pocket Kingdom came out, it would have stood a much better chance of being taken seriously.
Apologies all round! Somehow i got the impression that it was a offical date.
Have to say comments like this don't help:
'Well, the expected Tuesday switch-on of N-Gage failed to happen '
And this headline news story from AAS:
'N-Gage to officially 'start' next week
Published by Steve Litchfield at 21:34 GMT, December 13th 2007'